Attic air sealing in Mount Pleasant SC - a ceiling that holds the air you pay for

Most people who call us have a hot room, a draft they can't track down, or an attic nobody has looked at in years, and the insulation up there often looks fine at first glance. The price moves with how much there is to seal and how hard it is to reach, and the schedule turns on what the first look finds, since anything that needs fixing or checking comes before the sealing. I give you your own figure at the estimate, once I've seen the attic.

Before anyone climbs into the attic, I look at what's below it, because if your home has a gas furnace or water heater that draws its air naturally, we have it checked first. Then our crew moves the existing insulation aside where it covers the gaps and seals the holes through the ceiling, around light fixtures, duct boots where the vents meet the ceiling, wiring, plumbing and flues, as its own step before any insulation goes in. National best-practice guidance calls for caulk, foam or spray sealant on narrow gaps and rigid blocking sealed in place over wider openings, and in a vented attic it puts baffles, the guards that keep the eave vents open, in next. Only after that does insulation go back in.

If the attic or walls need more insulation once the gaps are closed, our retrofit insulation work adds it to a house you're already living in. When the ductwork lives in the attic, spray foam insulation under the roof seals and insulates in one pass, and it's worth the higher cost there because the ducts end up inside the sealed part of the house. Otherwise, sealing the gaps and topping up with blown-in insulation, loose fill blown through a hose, usually does the job for less, and that's what I'll most often suggest.

The Town of Mount Pleasant issues building permits for work above a value its building official sets and for any project that needs a structural inspection, so the rule alone doesn't settle whether your sealing job needs one. Before work starts, we check with the building office for your address, which outside Mount Pleasant may be another city or the county, and if a permit is needed we handle the application and keep you informed.

We're based in Mount Pleasant, and the attics we open up here range from older, lived-in homes with several layers of insulation to newer ones with a room over the garage that never keeps up with the rest of the house. In the older ones I look for knob and tube wiring, the early wiring strung on porcelain knobs, because new insulation has to wait until it's replaced or properly boxed in. We see the same mix on jobs in Charleston and North Charleston, and we handle it the same careful way.