When you think of what everyone is saying about how to ‘green your home’, the most common topics of discussion are LED light bulbs and low flow showerheads.

Something that may not be so familiar is increasing the thermal insulation throughout your home, or deciding to go with a higher R-valued insulation when you decide to build your home. Increasing the thermal insulation in your home is somewhat of a difficult process, but the payoffs can be quite substantial in the long run.

Mostly all homes (depending on age) will have some form of insulation in exterior walls. Like all materials, heat energy is able to transfer through objects. Through heating and cooling seasons a significant amount of energy can be transferred through exterior walls, rather than subsiding in your home to fulfill the objective of keeping you warm or cool. By increasing the amount of thermal resistance (upgrading insulation in walls) a majority of this air being lost to the outdoors can remain in your home.

Now one may wonder how big of impact will increasing the thermal insulation in my home have? The resulting impact is quite significant.

If you were to upgrade the thermal insulation to an old home that is about 2000 sq with relatively poor to no insulation you could be looking at savings of up to $2000 a year. A concept such as this sounds too good to be true. But just like anything in life there is a price. A project of this size would not see any real significant cost savings until the payback period has expired. With the prior example we could be looking at upwards of 13 years.

This concept may not be for everyone but it is food for thought. The possibilities of reducing the energy consumption in buildings and creating more efficient structures has barely scratched the surface.

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