Helping an Attic in Weatogue, CT

Challenge

This homeowner purchased her home in Weatogue, CT last year. This home was a Garrison colonial home from the 50s. Garrison colonials have a roofline that extends down to the other floors, giving a sloped effect. After they purchased the home, they put in a large amount of work, including replacing the roof and re-insulating the attic. This took place using multiple contractors. One contractor removed the original insulation (50s-era balsam wool), and they did a great job of clearing the attic and preparing it. However, the next contractors did not do as great of a job. When replacing the roof, they closed off the ridge vent. However, when insulating the attic, the contractors also blocked off some ventilation with baffles, causing a lack of ventilation. This is an issue -- ventilation is designed to keep the roof deck protected. When we had arrived to the home the only ventilation the attic had were the gable vents. This created a hostile environment. Making matters worse, that previous contractor had only air sealed half of the attic. This raised the positive pressure in the attic. 

After all of this happened, this homeowner called Fogarty's Home Services (a/k/a Dr. Energy Saver) so that she could understand what was going on. The owner of Fogarty's Home Services, Brendan Fogarty, personally came to her home to evaluate it. It was evident from the evaluation of the attic that this work had just been completed. During the evaluation, Brendan asked this homeowner a multitude of questions to better understand her thoughts and feelings -- she said that her primary concern was that mold was growing on the plywood base of their brand new roof. The evaluation proved this to be the case. The roof was not protected properly due to the lack of ventilation. The radiant heat cooking the roof shingles and the heat the homeowner paid for leaving the living area that winter caused the relative humidity in the attic to grow to 100% due to the extreme warmth causing vapor. The humidity then caused a large amount of mold. With all of these factors, the attic didn't even have a chance.

Solution

Fogarty's Home Services was prepared to help this homeowner with anything they needed. We needed to design a system to achieve an absolute thermal boundary for this homeowner. In order to try and heal the damage in this attic, we had to take a systematic approach. We first removed everything in the attic - fiberglass batts, loose fiberglass, baffles, and plywood. After that, we re-assessed the attic for mold to ensure no spot was missed during the initial inspection. We then treated the mold. Treatment is a two part process. The first part is our Mold-X2™ Cleaner, which is a non-abrasive cleaner that was sprayed on every effected area. With this cleaner, mold disappears instantly. After that, we applied the second part of the treatment - the Mold-X2™ Botanical treatment. Mold-X2™ Botanical is a plant-based disinfectant that prevents the mold from growing back. 

We also helped this homeowner by re-ducting her bath fans, as they were long enough to begin creating condensation (which would put them at a higher risk for mold reoccurring). Therefore, they were ducted out through the roof using insulated FlexDucts with butterfly valves. This ensures that air can go out without coming back in.

After this, we set out re-insulating the attic. We started with air sealing every spot that was missed or poorly done by the previous contractor. We did this utilizing our Zypfoam™ one part spray foam. We added can light covers and sealed around those as well, ensuring that the can lights would be protected from insulation when we added that. Then, we had to build a SuperPlatform™ insulated catwalk. This is built using our SilverGlo™ insulation board and OSB board, creating an insulated catwalk that the homeowner could utilize to reach important parts of the attic. After that, we dense packed the bays that the baffles had been in with our TruSoft™ cellulose insulation. We also insulated the attic's main floor using TruSoft™ cellulose insulation blown in to R-60.

The final issue we tackled for this homeowner was tackling their walk-up attic stairs. These stairs leaked a LOT of their conditioned air out of the living space -- and a lot of unconditioned air into the home! But how do you handle a non-traditional walk-up attic? Well, by customizing a solution, of course! We ended up combining two of our David Lewis Hatch Covers into a custom-built walk-up stair cover to ensure that that space in the attic was insulated.

Now, with the help of Fogarty's Home Services, this home will be much more comfortable, while also being safe from mold!