Insulating for Hurricane Season: Protecting Your Home from Wind and Water

The weird thing about hurricane season is that most of the calls don’t come during the storm.

They come months later.

We were at a house not long ago where the homeowner kept talking about a storm from the year before.

Not the last storm. The one before that.

I remember because I thought, “There’s no way we’re still talking about that storm.”

Turns out we were.

It didn’t look like a storm problem

At least not to me.

The house looked fine pulling into the driveway. Lawn looked good. Roof looked good. Nothing felt unusual.

Honestly, I thought we’d be in and out pretty quickly.

I was wrong.

The homeowner kept mentioning one room

That’s usually a clue.

Not always. But usually.

They said the back bedroom never felt the same after the storm. Not hotter exactly. Just different. They couldn’t really explain it and, to be fair, neither could I at first.

Sometimes homeowners struggle to describe comfort issues.

Sometimes we struggle to diagnose them.

That’s just reality.

A lot of homeowners schedule a free insulation evaluation when they start noticing comfort issues that don’t seem to have an obvious cause.

We spent more time talking than inspecting

Probably twenty minutes.

Maybe longer.

The homeowner told me about losing power. About neighbors whose fences ended up three streets away. About a generator that refused to start when they needed it.

None of that had anything to do with insulation.

Or at least I didn’t think it did.

Somewhere along the way

…we ended up in the attic.

That’s where things started making more sense.

Not all at once.

Little things.

A section of insulation that wasn’t where you’d expect it to be. A couple areas where airflow felt different. Nothing dramatic. Nothing you’d take a picture of and put on a billboard.

Just enough to make me stop and look again.

This part is hard to explain

After enough years doing this, you start noticing things before you know why you’re noticing them.

That probably sounds ridiculous.

But it’s true.

You’ll see something and immediately think, “That’s odd.”

Then ten minutes later you finally figure out what caught your attention.

That’s kind of what happened here.

Florida houses are strange sometimes

There’s no technical explanation in this section.

Sorry.

But we’ve looked at homes in Fort Myers and Cape Coral that were practically identical on paper and performed completely differently after a storm.

I couldn’t tell you why every time.

Sometimes houses just have personalities.

Maybe that’s not the professional answer.

It’s still the answer.

We see this after storms more than people realize

Not major damage.

The little stuff.

The things homeowners never notice because life gets busy. The storm passes. Everybody cleans up. Kids go back to school. Work gets hectic. A year goes by.

Then somebody notices their electric bill.

Or a room that feels different.

Or an attic that seems hotter than it used to.

And they can’t really pinpoint when it started.

That’s the part we see.

A lot.

If hurricane season is on your mind this year, it might be worth taking a look at what you can’t see as well as what you can. Sometimes everything is perfectly fine. Sometimes we find small issues that have been hanging around longer than anybody realized.

Call us or visit our website for a FREE evaluation!