No matter where you live in the U.S., you need to have effective insulation in your home. People often associate the word “insulation” with “keeping warm,” but insulation applies to both keeping warm and keeping cool. For living in San Antonio, TX, insulation does the crucial job of keeping the boiling summer heat from getting through your walls, which gives your air conditioner a far less grueling job to handle. And during our occasional Texas cold spells, the insulation will keep heat trapped inside your home and give your heating system a break as well.
If you want additional information about properly heating and cooling your home, contact the company that has served San Antonio with quality comfort for over a quarter of a century: Cowboys Air Conditioning & Heating.
Insulation: Here’s How It Works
The reason insulation works to keep you warm and cool is because it serves as a thermal barrier. All that insulation does, essentially, is resist the flow of heat. A warm jacket keeps heat from escaping your body to the colder air, making you warmer. A well-insulated home prevents outside heat from entering, making your environment cooler.
Heat flow uses three basic mechanisms: conduction (moving through material), convection (circulating through liquids and gasses), and radiation (heating anything solid in the path of heat traveling in a straight line). The materials in commercial and residential insulation work by slowing the conductive flow of heat. The layers of low-conductive material in insulation reduce how much heat gets through.
Insulation’s effectiveness is measured as “R-value”: the higher the R-value of the insulation, the better it slows heat conduction. An insulation calculator is used to determine how high an R-value you’ll need for your home’s insulation. However, proper placement of insulation material is as important as its R-value: poor installation will mean heat flow getting through the many gaps where insulation was put in improperly.
Having good insulation in your home means both improved comfort and energy savings. If you have a powerful air conditioner or heater in your home that seems to be working without problems, yet you find that you can never get the right level of comfort, you may need to investigate your home’s insulation.
Call up Cowboys Air Conditioning & Heating to learn more about insulation in San Antonio and how it can work for you. We still do things the old-fashioned way: with a handshake.
