Insulation Contractor Serving Asheville, NC

Choose one that tells you plainly what your attic needs and prices only that. ENERGY STAR's hiring guide says a good estimate includes baffles at the eaves and sealing of the attic floor before insulation, and it suggests comparing more than one. Ask for the target as an R-value. In Asheville's zone that's R-60 for an empty attic. After the job, the FTC's R-value Rule entitles you to a receipt listing what went in.

The insulation that got wet usually does, but the roof comes first. The National Weather Service's summary of Helene records gusts of 55 to 70 mph across the region and hundreds of trees falling on houses. ENERGY STAR reads wet insulation as a sign of a leaking roof, and moldy or rotted rafters as a moisture problem, both to be put right before any insulation work. Once the roof is sound, we vacuum out what got soaked, seal the bare ceiling and blow in a new layer. Dry insulation away from the damage can stay. Storm damage is one case where we'll come see the attic before we price it.

Yes, by ENERGY STAR's table. Buncombe County is in climate zone 4, where the targets are R-60 for an empty attic and R-49 added over 3 to 4 inches. New Hanover County, around Wilmington, is in zone 3, where the same figures are R-49 and R-38. How much your attic needs depends on what's already up there, so tell us the depth you have when you ask for a price.

Yes. We serve all of North Carolina, so the mountain towns around Asheville are covered, Fletcher and the rest of Henderson County included. Weaverville, Woodfin and Black Mountain each have their own page in the list of nearby towns. Wherever the house is, the price comes on paper, and for most attics the square footage is enough to get it.

We do. Most of our work is in attics, but closed walls in an existing house can be filled with blown-in insulation, a garage ceiling under a bedroom or bonus room can be insulated and sealed, and commercial buildings get attic and ceiling work too. Home energy audits are a paid service, kept apart from the free attic estimate.

For most Asheville attics, it starts with the square footage. You send it, or you give us the address and we figure it ourselves, along with anything you know about the flues, the chimney, the hatch and any extra attic spaces. You get the price in writing. A house with a complicated roof or old wiring may get a special visit first. When install day comes, the crew checks the attic with you before they unload anything. If your attic needs nothing, we'll say so.

Not for the insulation itself. The Historic Resources Commission was set up in 1979 by the city and Buncombe County. It reviews work on local landmarks and in the four local historic districts: Montford, Biltmore Village, Albemarle Park and Saint Dunstan's. State law gives a commission a say over the outside of a building, not the arrangement inside, and attic insulation and air sealing are indoor work. Adding roof, ridge or soffit vents alters the exterior, so talk to the commission before that part. The city adds that a National Register district alone, such as Norwood Park, brings no design review.

Often it is warmth escaping from the rooms below. Asheville gets real snow: the Weather Service's list of the city's greatest snowstorms, kept from 1869, is led by the March 1993 storm at 18.2 inches. When warm air leaks into the attic, it melts snow on the upper roof, and the water refreezes at the cold eaves. Building America's remedy is a tight, well-insulated ceiling with air moving from soffit to ridge, which keeps the attic cold. So we seal the ceiling first, then insulate, and keep the soffit vents open.

An electrician, before any insulation goes in. Asheville built at a furious pace through the mid-1920s, then the bank failures of November 1930 brought building nearly to a stop until the late 1930s. Montford and Norwood Park both date largely from those years or earlier. Wiring of that era can include knob-and-tube. ENERGY STAR calls it a fire risk where insulation covers it, and it is to be corrected before the attic is insulated. We look for it first, and wherever it is live, no insulation goes over it.