Blown-in insulation in Sparks NV - an even layer over a sound, sealed attic

Most attics I look at already have some insulation, just not much, and it's settled thin over the years. The first thing I decide is whether yours can take a new layer now or needs a repair or a test first, because that's what sets your schedule. The price mostly comes down to the size of the attic, how many inches are already up there, how much attic air sealing the ceiling needs, and whether any old material has to come out. I come out and look in person, so you get a number for your house and not a guess over the phone.

I start in the attic with a flashlight, checking how deep the old insulation is, whether it's dry and clean, and where your gas appliances get their air, since tightening up a house changes how they breathe. If the old layer is dry and clean, we can usually blow new material right over it, but if I find wet insulation, old wiring or anything that looks like vermiculite, we stop and sort that out with you first. Once the attic is ready, our crew seals the gaps around light fixtures, pipes, wires and the hatch, because insulation can't do much against air leaking right through it. We set baffles at the eaves, which are guides that keep the vents open so the attic can still breathe, then blow the fill to an even depth all the way out to the edges, where a lot of attics run thin. We clean up and show you what's up there before we leave.

Blown-in work often ties into the rest of the house. If cold floors or the room over the garage are part of the problem, we look at home insulation for the walls and crawl space too, so you're not fixing one spot and leaving the next. When old insulation is soaked, full of droppings or flattened past saving, insulation removal comes first, because new fill over a bad layer just keeps the problem.

The City of Sparks keeps a list of work that needs a permit, and it names things like roofing, furnaces and new plumbing or electrical, not blown-in insulation, so that list alone doesn't settle whether your job needs one. Before we start, we check with the city or county office for your address, tell you what it asks for, and take care of the permit when your job needs one. Sparks also builds to a current energy code with northern Nevada amendments, and new attic insulation should meet or exceed today's code, so that's the standard we plan the job around.

A lot of houses here were insulated once when they were built and left alone since, so we find settled fill, gaps around old light fixtures and gas appliances that need their fresh air left alone. We see the same attics on jobs in Reno and Spanish Springs, and we work across the Reno and Sparks area and the cities around it, out to Carson City, Fernley and Truckee, CA. If you don't see your city, just ask.