How's your garage insulation? Do you even have garage insulation? If you are not sure, or at least sure about the condition of your garage insulation, you should read this article. Many homeowners feel that, because it's behind a door and ?inside? the house, they don't need garage insulation or they don't need as much insulation in the garage as they do elsewhere in their home. It's a sort of psychological thing ? you see the garage door and assume that keeps out a lot of heat and cold and there's no need for garage insulation.

The truth is that temperatures inside your garage can reach the same extremes as outside temperatures. Any walls or floors in your home that are shared with your garage should have the same insulation as any other wall, floor or ceiling in your home. However, garage insulation does a lot more than keep your home warmer in winter or cooler in summer. Your garage is home to a variety of fumes, odours and dirty air. Every time you start your car, open a can of paint or store your lawn mower, it releases damaging polluted air. Without garage insulation, that smelly and unhealthy air has an easy time getting into your home and causing breathing problems or aggravating allergies.

Aside from keeping the air in your home healthier, garage insulation will keep your home quieter. When you start your car, or lawnmower, or do any work in your garage, those sounds can travel throughout your home, unless you have garage insulation to deaden the sound.

While there are a number of advantages to having garage insulation, you may not be able to enjoy them all unless you install the right type of insulation. Not every type of insulation that can keep out heat and cold, seal against air leaks and deaden sound. Indeed, many of the most popular types of insulation will not give you all of these benefits.

For example, the most popular type of insulation, for garages or anywhere else in your home, is fibreglass batt insulation, which is good for stopping sound from entering your home. However, when it comes to insulating your home, fibreglass batts may not be the best choice. To understand why, you need to know how garage insulation, or any other type of insulation, is rated. The main purpose of insulation is to stop the transfer of heat. Insulation is given an R-value depending on how good it is at stopping heat transfer. The higher an insulation's R-value, the better it is at stopping heat. The problem with batt insulation is that, while it can have as high an R-value as any other type of insulation, it's R-value is reduced by even slight amounts of moisture. Garages are notoriously damp places. If you open your garage door during rains, or spring runoff, all that moist air has a huge entrance into your garage, which means that fibreglass batts are probably not the best garage insulation for keeping heat and cold out of your home.

Fibreglass batts and solid foam boards, another popular type of garage insulation, are designed to fit perfectly between your garage's wall studs and ceiling joists. The problem is that they rarely fit ?perfectly? and, even when they do, gaps are left in odd sized or hard to reach areas. Those gaps are like open windows, which allows all the nasty air in your garage to enter you home freely. So even foam board is not the best garage insulation material.

Loose cellulose fill is yet another popular type of garage insulation, but it too has it's drawbacks. Like fibreglass batts, loose cellulose is damaged by moisture and will not insulate as well as it's R-value indicates if it gets wet.

Of all the most popular garage insulation materials, only spray foam insulation is effective at insulating your home from everything your garage has to offer. First, spray foam insulation is not affected by moisture of any kind. Once it is applied, spray foam insulation expands to fill small gaps and leaks, which will actually reduce the moisture in your garage. By filling all the gaps between your garage and home, spray foam insulation creates an effective seal that keeps out harmful pollutants, fumes, noise, heat and cold. When it comes to garage insulation, there are few materials as effective as spray foam insulation.

Air Seal Insulators are specialists at using spray foam for your garage insulation needs.