Flyover
Trying not to screw things up worse
In a few days we're having someone out to give us an estimate on insulating our attic. We currently have some crumbly stuff you can scoop up from between the joists, and it's sparse and isn't working all that well. The kids' rooms are colder than the rest of the house, and presumably leaking and costing us a lot of money.
1) What should I be asking the insulation installers to do, exactly? This is actually a bunch of related questions rolled into one.
a) Will they try to sell me on one thing when I should be insistent on something else?
b) Will they try to charge me for removing the existing insulation, or is that something I want them to do?
c) The pink fiberglass stuff you roll out in sheets seems to me like it would insulate better and last longer than the stuff you blow in through a hose, but what do I know. Maybe one is way more expensive than the other, to the point where the expensive one just isn't worth it?
d) I think we might have mice in our attic. Is there a type of insulation that mice cannot eat, or that might even help mitigate the mouse problem?
e) I'm sure any kind of insulation is available from different brands, but how do I tell which brands are good, which are shoddy, and which are overpriced?
f) What method of measuring R-value should I be looking for?
g) What should I consider a minimum acceptable R value (I live in central Oh Hah), and what should I consider overkill?
2) What should I look for in a reliable, trustworthy installer? Anything particular I can look for or ask when the representative comes to give the quote? (Beyond the normal "do they show up on time and not smell like pot" type stuff.)
3) I have a single story ranch with about 1600 feet of attic space needing insulation. I basically never need to access my attic and it isn't really made to be accessed anyway. What insulation cost estimates should I consider suspiciously low or unreasonably high?
My wife has been the sole point of contact with them so far and she accidentally called it "roofing" rather than insulation, and she accidentally called our attic the crawl space, so I'm worried they're going to try and rip us off because they've sensed my wife has no clue what she's talking about (in most other cases they'd be wrong but in this one they'd be right). So I want to make sure a clueless i.e. vulnerable customer isn't what they actually encounter.
1) What should I be asking the insulation installers to do, exactly? This is actually a bunch of related questions rolled into one.
a) Will they try to sell me on one thing when I should be insistent on something else?
b) Will they try to charge me for removing the existing insulation, or is that something I want them to do?
c) The pink fiberglass stuff you roll out in sheets seems to me like it would insulate better and last longer than the stuff you blow in through a hose, but what do I know. Maybe one is way more expensive than the other, to the point where the expensive one just isn't worth it?
d) I think we might have mice in our attic. Is there a type of insulation that mice cannot eat, or that might even help mitigate the mouse problem?
e) I'm sure any kind of insulation is available from different brands, but how do I tell which brands are good, which are shoddy, and which are overpriced?
f) What method of measuring R-value should I be looking for?
g) What should I consider a minimum acceptable R value (I live in central Oh Hah), and what should I consider overkill?
2) What should I look for in a reliable, trustworthy installer? Anything particular I can look for or ask when the representative comes to give the quote? (Beyond the normal "do they show up on time and not smell like pot" type stuff.)
3) I have a single story ranch with about 1600 feet of attic space needing insulation. I basically never need to access my attic and it isn't really made to be accessed anyway. What insulation cost estimates should I consider suspiciously low or unreasonably high?
My wife has been the sole point of contact with them so far and she accidentally called it "roofing" rather than insulation, and she accidentally called our attic the crawl space, so I'm worried they're going to try and rip us off because they've sensed my wife has no clue what she's talking about (in most other cases they'd be wrong but in this one they'd be right). So I want to make sure a clueless i.e. vulnerable customer isn't what they actually encounter.
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