Insulating a home is essential to ensure our comfort and well-being. Today, many homeowners make the mistake of focusing mainly on insulating the ground floor, floors, as well as the roof and forgetting about basement insulation altogether. And yet, insulating your foundation is essential for the protection of your entire home. That’s why it’s important to insulate the foundation to protect your basement, but more broadly to protect your home.
To insulate concrete foundations, there are several processes: insulation from the inside, from the outside, or both.
Protecting Your Basement: A Few Preliminary Checks
Pressure from the soil, the water table or underground gases as well as frost and weather conditions often make life difficult for our foundations. But one of the biggest scourges is probably humidity since it leads to condensation and, later, the appearance of mold.
Before looking to insulate your basement foundation, you can perform a water test that will allow you to visualize the humidity level in your walls. It’s also best to check your concrete for interior cracks . Indeed, these are usually strong signs of a poor condition of the foundations. In this case, insulation is only possible after the repair is complete.
Why insulating concrete foundations from the inside is a recommended solution?
Insulating your concrete foundation from inside your home is a terribly effective solution since it is usually the easiest to do. Thus, it represents a significant saving of time and money.
It is used to deal with thermal problems that may occur at the junction of walls. By opting for this solution, don’t neglect the exterior of your basement. For the insulation technique to be perfect, your exterior walls must be in good condition.
Insulating concrete foundations from the inside: what are the options?
In order to benefit from maximum insulation and therefore benefit from a basement free of mold and moisture, you will first need to apply a layer of insulation continuously over the entire surface of the concrete.
To do this, there are several options in the choice of insulation:
Rigid Panels
You can choose to use rigid expanded or extruded polystyrene panels. This technique offers high thermal resistance and an uninterrupted layer of insulation.
Polyurethane squirt
The use of spray polyurethane offers unrivalled thermal performance and exceptional adhesion on all surfaces. In addition, with the swelling of the foam, the product fills all the holes for optimal protection of your basement walls. These many advantages obviously come at a cost since spray polyurethane is the most expensive product.
Rock wool mattress
This technique is unquestionably the cheapest of all. Even though it has some advantages such as a lightweight and easy-to-install material, it does not offer very high thermal resistance and must always be covered with a vapour barrier.
Because insulating a home’s foundation is not to be taken lightly, make the best choice for your concrete foundation. If you need the assistance of a specialist, you can contact us and we will be happy to provide you with our expertise.
Need a Crack Repair Expert?
If you notice cracks on your foundation, it is important to act quickly. Fissure Expert offers professional foundation crack injection services throughout Quebec. Call a certified foundation crack contractor for a free estimate. We serve Chicoutimi, Trois-Rivières, Gatineau and many other cities.