Air sealing services in Pueblo CO - drafts stopped before the insulation goes in

Most people call about the room over the garage that never warms up, cold floors or a power bill that keeps climbing even after someone added insulation. That last one is usually the giveaway, because air walks right past most insulation, and attic insulation piled over open gaps is a common reason a house still feels drafty. The price moves with the size of the house, how easy the attic is to get around in and how much old insulation has to come up before we can reach the leaks. The schedule turns on whether you get a blower door test first, whether insulation follows the sealing and whether your address needs a permit. You get your own figure once I've looked at the space.

I start by looking at what's already up there, how many inches of it and whether it's wet or full of droppings from a mouse that overstayed, because fresh material over a mess just keeps the mess. On a big sealing job we like to see blower door results first, a test that shows how leaky the house is, so we're chasing real leaks and not guessing. Then our crew pulls back or removes old insulation where it's in the way and seals around can lights, plumbing and wiring holes, duct runs, fans and the attic hatch, keeping the eave vents clear so the attic can still breathe. We're careful around the furnace, water heater and anything else that burns fuel, so it still gets the air it needs once the house is tighter, and when a space is in doubt, a BPI-certified technician can run a combustion appliance zone test to show which sealing is safe there.

Sealing usually leads into other work. Foam costs more but seals and insulates in one pass, so I steer people toward closed-cell foam insulation, a dense foam that also blocks moisture, mainly when the ductwork lives in the attic, and otherwise sealing the gaps and topping up loose fill usually wins. Down below, the rim joists where the house sits on the foundation leak plenty of air, so we often seal them as part of basement insulation.

Inside Pueblo city limits and Boone, building permits come from the Southern Colorado Building Department, and outside them the Pueblo County Building Division handles permits, so your address decides which office you deal with. Whether an air sealing job needs a permit isn't something I'd guess at, so the first step is to check with the department. If yours does, we pull it and line up the inspection.

We're based in Pueblo, and the older houses here tend to leak in the same places, around a loose attic hatch, through can lights cut into plaster ceilings and along plumbing stacks that run straight up into the attic. Newer houses aren't off the hook, but they hide it better behind more drywall and deeper fill. We see the same patterns on jobs in Pueblo West and Colorado Springs, and in Fountain, Fort Carson, Security-Widefield, Stratmoor and plenty of the cities around them.