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Community Corner

New Homes Can Fool You!

New homes can't need insulation, right?

Here's a very big problem and on the plus side, a very nice pay off when you fix it.

 

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The truth is most Americans have poorly insulated homes.  There's just no way around this truth.  Frankly, most builders have used the cheapest insulations possible because up to this point, very few buyers cared.  That leaves homes, even new ones, with little to no insulation.

 

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No one wants to believe a newly constructed home they purchased in the past 10 years could need insulation.  Who can blame them?  Homes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.  They paid good money for it, and still are paying every month.  Worse, they have hot and cold spots in the house despite their heating and cooling bills!  The home should have great insulation.  After all, it's part of the house, right?

 

Look, the truth is not comforting, but owning up to it is the only way forward.  Most homes are horribly insulated because we, as a nation, really haven't cared about it.  Energy has been monetarily cheap, we're busy doing other things, and frankly, we're very late arriving to the GREEN party. 

 

When we walk through a home, we look at the kitchen, the bathrooms, the areas we'll spend time with our family and friends.  Anyone who has watched HGTV knows how easy they make it look to stage a great looking home or to add value for relatively cheap. 

 

It's called window-dressing for a reason.  It's appearances.  It's not deceitful, it's simply how we work.  We focus on what's in front of us. 

 

However, what we don't see is sealed away in attics, walls, crawl spaces and dramatic cathedral ceilings.  It's very hard to get a good evaluation of the insulation, and the number of air leaks in a home during a walk through, and so few people ever ask to see recent utility bills.  It's definitely not listed on the MLS sheets...not yet, at least.

 

New homes need an air barrier and improved insulation.  Scary, especially because there are other things we want to do with that money instead of bury it in the walls or attic for no one to admire! 

 

How weird is it that we often choose to spend that money and more over the course of a few months instead of fixing the problems we find?

 

It's painful to admit we need to fix the homes we've recently bought.  Pretending we don't know doesn't make it go away.  Quite the contrary, we just fritter away the money we could have if we invested in and fixed the problem now. 

 

And look on the bright side.  Your home would have cost more if it were insulated properly at the start.  With the improvements, you reap the value add and not the builder nor the banker!

 

A CL&P energy assessment will provide you with the tools and reward you with rebates to stop these unneeded energy expenses.

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