Too cold?
Your house is cold. Here is what is actually causing it.
Almost every cold-house complaint in Metro Detroit comes down to one of a handful of causes — and most of them are not the furnace, and not the windows. Find your symptom below.
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The floor upstairs is cold underfoot
Heat is leaving through the ceiling above, not arriving from below. An under-insulated, unsealed attic floor pulls warmth up and out of the rooms beneath it.
Attic insulation → -
The floor downstairs is cold, especially near outside walls
Almost always the rim joist — the band of framing where your floor sits on the foundation. It is thin, usually bare, and it leaks cold air straight across the basement and up through the floor.
Rim joist and crawl space → -
One room never warms up, no matter what the thermostat says
In a bungalow this is usually an uninsulated knee wall behind the bedroom. In a pre-war house it is often a completely empty wall cavity. In a colonial it is frequently a duct problem, not an insulation one.
Wall insulation → -
The furnace runs constantly and still cannot keep up
The envelope is losing heat faster than the furnace can add it. Before anyone sells you a bigger furnace, find out how much heat is leaving — a right-sized furnace in a leaky house behaves exactly like an undersized one.
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Drafts at the baseboards, outlets or basement stairs
Air is moving through the house, not just sitting in it. Warm air escaping high through the attic has to be replaced by cold air pulled in low. You feel the replacement, not the escape.
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Ice builds up along the roof edge every February
An insulation problem misdiagnosed as a roofing one. Heat escaping into the attic melts the snow above it, the water runs to the cold overhang and refreezes into a dam that backs up under the shingles.
How ice dams form →
It is really only two problems wearing different hats.
Everything in that list traces back to heat conducting through surfaces that do not resist it well enough, or air physically moving through gaps. Insulation fixes the first. Air sealing fixes the second. Most houses need both, and doing only one is why some people insulate and still feel cold.
Check it yourself in five minutes
You do not need us to find out whether you have a problem. Open the attic hatch, shine a light, and push a tape measure straight down through the insulation until it hits the ceiling drywall — not to the top of a joist, all the way down.
- Under 6 inches: that is roughly R-11 to R-19. Well short.
- 6 to 10 inches: better, still below what this climate calls for.
- 16 inches: you are at target. Your money is probably better spent on air sealing or the rim joist.
Metro Detroit sits in DOE Climate Zone 5, where the recommendation for attics is R-49 to R-60. The full R-value guide has the depth-to-R-value table and what to look for while you are up there.
Step only on the joists. The drywall between them will not hold you, and going through a ceiling is a much more expensive problem than thin insulation.
What we would do, in order
Not everything at once, and not necessarily all of it. In rough order of payback for a typical Metro Detroit house:
- Air seal the attic floor. Top plates, chases, can lights, the hatch. Cheapest thing on this list and the one that makes everything after it work properly.
- Bring the attic to depth. Blown cellulose over what is already there, no tear-out in most homes.
- Seal and insulate the rim joist. Small job, and often the single best dollar-for-dollar comfort improvement in the house.
- Then, if the problem persists, the walls. Real work at real cost, and rarely where we would start.
What we will tell you not to bother with
If your attic already measures near depth and the plane has been sealed, we will say so and you will not get a quote from us. That happens, and it costs you nothing to find out — the assessment is free either way.
Worth knowing before you budget: DTE pays up to $600 on qualifying insulation work and the federal 25C credit covers 30% up to $1,200 a year. Details on the rebates page.
Cold house questions
Should I replace my furnace or fix the insulation first?
Fix the envelope first, unless the furnace is genuinely failing. Heating equipment is sized to the heat loss of the house — so if you air seal and insulate first, you may end up needing a smaller, cheaper unit. Do it the other way round and you pay for capacity you no longer need. Any HVAC contractor doing a proper Manual J load calculation will tell you the same thing.
Is it the windows?
Usually not, and we do not sell windows so we have no reason to say otherwise. Windows are a small fraction of the surface area of your house, and replacing them is one of the slowest-paying efficiency upgrades there is. If your attic is at R-13 and your rim joist is bare, the windows are not your problem yet.
Why is upstairs cold when heat is supposed to rise?
Heat does rise — and then it keeps going, straight out through the ceiling if nothing stops it. The upstairs of a house with a thin attic floor is not warmer than the downstairs, it is the place where the heat leaves fastest.
How cold is too cold for the work to be worth doing?
It is not about how cold you feel, it is about how much you have. If your attic measures under R-30, adding depth almost always pays back in this climate. Above roughly R-49, your money does more good elsewhere. Check it yourself with a ruler before calling anyone.
Can you actually fix a room that has always been cold?
Usually yes, and it is some of the more satisfying work we do — but only once somebody identifies the real cause. A room over a garage, a room behind a knee wall, and a room at the end of a long duct run are three different problems with three different fixes. The free assessment exists to tell them apart.
Find out which one it is.
Free measured assessment. We check the attic, the rim joist and the rooms that feel wrong, then tell you what is worth doing.