Insulation Contractor Serving Wilmington, NC

Pick one who'll put everything in writing and only charge for what your attic needs. ENERGY STAR's hiring guide suggests getting estimates from more than one contractor, and it says each should include baffles at the eaves and sealing of the attic floor before any insulation goes in. Ask for the target as an R-value, not only in inches. When the job is done, the FTC's R-value Rule requires the installer to give you a receipt, and for blown-in insulation it shows the square footage covered, the depth as installed and after settling, the R-value and how many bags went in.

Sometimes. A house from the 1990s or later was insulated when it was built, so what matters is whether the layer has settled, whether it covers the eaves and whether it got disturbed when equipment went in. Built to today's code, the ceiling would hold R-38, which is short of ENERGY STAR's R-49 for this zone. If your attic is already deep and even, we'll tell you to leave it alone.

No. ENERGY STAR puts kitchen, bath and dryer vents that exhaust into the attic, instead of outdoors, on its list of problems to fix before an attic is insulated. Here on the coast, that means warm, wet air with nowhere to go but the attic. If yours ends in the attic, it gets run to the outdoors before the new layer goes down.

Yes. Insulation Pros serves homes across North Carolina, so the towns around Wilmington, on both sides of the Cape Fear, are in the same service area. Each has a page of its own among the nearby towns above. Pricing works the same way there, from the square footage for most attics.

Attics come first: attic insulation, insulation removal and air sealing. We also insulate garages, including the ceiling under a room over the garage, insulate the closed walls of a house that's already standing, insulate the floors over crawl spaces and insulate commercial buildings. Home energy audits are a paid service of their own, separate from the free estimate.

Start with the size: the attic floor's square footage, or the address for us to work from. It also helps to know roughly when the house was built, whether the air handler or ducts are up there, any roof leak you know about and which rooms never feel right. ENERGY STAR suggests telling the contractor if the house is from the 1930s or earlier, since its attic may hold knob-and-tube wiring. Before install day, clear a path to the hatch or pull-down stairs.

Usually not. The city says houses in its National Register districts, such as Carolina Place, Sunset Park and Brookwood, fall outside Historic Preservation Commission review unless they also lie within a local district. The local districts and overlays include the Residential Historic District, the downtown commercial overlay and the Carolina Heights and Winoca Terrace overlay. There, exterior alterations require a certificate of appropriateness. Under state law, a commission does not rule on how the inside of a house is arranged. Insulating and sealing the attic is interior work. Cutting vents into the roof or soffits changes the outside, so check with the city's preservation staff first.

Look at the insulation near any damaged part of the roof: wet, flattened or discolored insulation means water came in. After Hurricane Fran in 1996, the National Weather Service reported damage to about three of every four homes in the city. It called the wind damage to roofs across the area from Florence in 2018 some of the worst in modern memory. In ENERGY STAR's guidance, insulation that is wet tells you the roof is leaking. The roofer comes first. Once the roof is sound, we vacuum the ruined layer out and blow fresh insulation in its place.

Mostly because heat and cold reach it from below as well as from above. The Brookwood Historic District's nomination notes that two-story garages with apartments over them began going up there in the 1950s, and the garage under such a room is not heated or cooled. The Building America Solution Center says a garage ceiling with living space above should be air sealed, with the floor insulation touching the underside of the subfloor all the way across. The room's own ceiling and any kneewalls need the same care. We insulate garages as well as attics.