How to Insulate Your Basement

Insulating your basement is an important part of having a healthy and efficient home. Not only do you create a year around habitable space you improve thermal performance of the entire dwelling. This will definitely reduce your heating bills in the cold season. Other benefits are eliminating the kind of damp environments that encourage mold and mildew and greatly reducing the chances of having frozen pipes. Insulation protects the foundation of your house from frost heaving which can crack and destroy your home.

Most people think making their home more efficient is mostly insulation, this is partially right. Insulation is only half of what makes your home efficiently warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The other half of the equation is known as 'Thermal Mass'. Mass in terms of residential construction is essentially any hard, dense, heavy material. A concrete block is a good example of thermal mass. Greater mass means the greater potential to store heat, kind of like storing power in a battery. Dense materials such as concrete store and transmit/conduct heat quite well.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.helium.com/items/2264119-insulating-your-basement