Fall is the time of year when homeowners are painfully reminded of heating costs as they turn up the thermostat and fill up the oil tank.
And one of the best ways to reduce those costs, make your house warmer and increase your home’s energy efficiency is to insulate.
Utility companies even sweeten the savings by offering rebate programs. But what a hassle right?
Not so.
Clean Crawls can help get a rebate program started for you, said marketing director Nicole Butcher.
Clean Crawls serves the greater Puget Sound region and specializes in cleaning out attic and crawl spaces and insulation.
“Our estimates are free, so it doesn’t hurt to have us come and look,” Butcher said, adding that Clean Crawls can help homeowners through the rebate paperwork process.
The savings from insulating your home — either for the first time or removing and replacing old insulation — happen over time, but most utility companies estimate that homeowners see up to a 30 percent drop in energy costs, Butcher said.
“We work with all major utility companies in the Puget Sound area, and we work with all the rebate programs, the guidelines that qualify homeowners for rebates,” Butcher said.
Clean Crawls also insulates exterior walls of older homes. Those homes built before 1982 were not required to have exterior walls insulated.
“So most of these homes are not only losing out on the sound-deafening capability of insulation, they are losing the heat that way also,” Butcher said.
According to Clean Crawls professionals, the attic is the most critical space in your home to have insulation installed properly, and at the correct “R” value, because heat rises.
An “R” value is a rating based on how well insulation holds back warm or cool air. Bare concrete foundation walls rate about R-1; new attic insulation measures an R-38.
Typically, Clean Crawls puts in an R-38 insulation in for attics; for crawl spaces they offer R-19 or R-30, Butcher said.
“The insulation we provide, after we go out to a job site, is the best fit for that home, depending on the home’s structure, how deep the joists are and things like that,” Butcher said.
Clean Crawls can also offer “green” insulation options such as spray foam, or a cellulose-based blow-in insulation made from recycled newspaper or cotton-batted insulation made from recycled blue jeans.
Butcher wants to remind homeowners that if they’ve turned their heat on for the first time this season and have noticed an unpleasant odor, that could be a signal of a vermin problem.
“One statistic we share is that 40 percent of the air you breathe in your home comes from the attic,” Butcher said. “So if you have rodents and mold and all that is coming into your house, especially in the winter when you’ve turned your heat on and starting to move that air around, that is not a healthy environment.”
Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424; goffredo@heraldnet.com.
Clean Crawls
To find out more about Clean Crawls or insulation rebate programs go to www.cleancrawl.com/ or call 866-651-1700.
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