Why Are My Floors So Cold? Many home owners notice that the floors on their first floor get cold during the winter time. Cold floors are typically caused by 2 or 3 things: Floor Insulation for Rooms Above a Garage If you have a room over a garage, your floors will often be cold because when your home was built, the floor insulation was not installed so that it was in direct contact with the floor above. When insulation is not in direct contact with the surface it is intended to insulate, convection currents form — and cold floors are the result. The Solution Insulwise fixes cold floors with floor insulation. We install floor insulation by dense packing cellulose insulation into the ceiling of your garage. When cellulose insulation is packed tightly during installation, the result is insulation that is pressed tightly to the floor above, and the elimination of air movement beneath your floor. The effect is permanent, and the result is: Much Warmer Floors. If you’d like to see a quick video on exactly how Insulwise uses dense pack cellulose to insulate garage ceilings, click the image below! Crawl Space Insulation for Rooms Above a Crawl Space When rooms are over a crawl space and the floors above are cold, poorly installed crawl space insulation is usually the culprit. Usually fiberglass batts are stapled into the joist bays below, but it’s almost always sagging below the floors themselves and this is one problem. The other problem is that cold air constantly leaks through the rim joist areas of most homes, as well as the block wall foundations themselves. When you combine poor existing crawl space insulation, with cold air infiltration from outside, you get cold rooms above! The Solution Insulwise solves the problem of cold floors above a crawl space by making the crawl space area part of the home’s “conditioned space.” We first attach 2” inch thick, R-11 rated Silver Glow foam board to the block wall foundation. This insulates as well as air seals the foundation wall. After that we spray foam the rim joist area. The magic of spray foam is that it not only insulates the rim joist, but air seals it and thus eliminates the cold drafts passing under and over it at the same time. Lastly we cover the floor with a 20 mil thick, vinyl vapor barrier. This acts to keep soil gases as well as moisture from making its way into the crawl space, and thus into the home. The result? A much warmer floor above!
