Home insulation in Pueblo CO - a house that holds its heat through the winter

At Precision Pueblo Spray Foam Insulation, most calls start with a room that never warms up, cold floors, a room over the garage that bakes in July or a power bill that climbs every winter. The price moves with how many areas need work, whether old insulation has to come out first and how hard the spaces are to get into, and the schedule turns on prep, because anything in the attic that needs fixing gets fixed before insulation goes over it. I look at the space before I put a price on anything, and the estimate tells you what your house needs and in what order.

I start by going through the attic, the floors, the crawl space and the rim joists and telling you which part is losing you the most heat, because sometimes the honest answer is one area now and the rest later. In the attic, the first checks are for old vermiculite, roof leaks, live knob-and-tube wiring, the oldest kind of house wiring, and bath fans that blow into the attic instead of outside, since all of those get dealt with before insulation buries them. Then our crew does the air sealing, closing the gaps around can lights, pipes, wires and the hatch, and puts metal collars around hot flues so insulation stays off them. The insulation goes in last, as deep at the edges as in the middle, with the eave vents left open so the attic can still breathe, and we clean up on the way out.

If the old insulation is soaked or full of droppings, insulation removal comes first, because new material laid over that just keeps the problem, and the mice, under a fresh blanket. Cold floors usually trace back to what's underneath, so crawl space insulation and the rim joists along the foundation are often part of the same plan.

Which building office covers your house depends on the address. City of Pueblo and Town of Boone addresses go to the Southern Colorado Building Department, while addresses outside them, including Pueblo West, now go to Pueblo County Building, and the Colorado Springs side uses its own office. Before we start, we find out which one covers your house, and if the job needs a permit, we pull it and line up the inspection.

Pueblo's older neighborhoods have plenty of houses with a few inches of settled fill in the attic, open rim joists over the basement and a hatch nobody ever sealed. Newer houses tend to have more up top but ductwork running through the attic, which changes what material makes sense. We see the same mix on jobs in Colorado Springs, and we work it the same way there, worst leak first.