Garage Insulation

A Brevard garage takes sun on at least one exterior wall and usually a large uninsulated door, has no conditioning of its own, and holds that heat well into the evening. Most of them run within a few degrees of the attic on a July afternoon.

That would not matter if the garage were a separate building. It is not. It shares a wall with the house, often a ceiling with a bedroom or a bonus room, and a door that gets opened all day. Every one of those surfaces is a path for heat into space you are paying to cool.

If one room in the house never matches the thermostat, and that room sits over the garage, you have found the reason. A floor over an unconditioned garage is a ceiling from the garage's point of view, and in a lot of Brevard construction it went in with nothing in the joist bays or with batts that have since sagged out of contact.

Insulation only works where it touches. A batt that has slumped away from the subfloor leaves an air gap doing nothing, which is why we look at contact and fit rather than just whether something is technically present.

Two surfaces do the most work for the least money. The first is the wall between the garage and the house, which is often the largest uninsulated surface in the building. The second is the attic access, because a lot of Brevard homes put the pull-down stairs in the garage ceiling. That hatch is a hole in whatever insulation is up there, opening into the hottest room on the property.

Sealing and insulating the hatch is an hour of work that people are surprised by, because it is the smallest surface on the list and one of the most consequential.

Gyms, workshops, offices, and studios all run into the same wall: the space was never built to hold a temperature. Insulating the envelope first is what makes conditioning it later affordable, and doing it in the other order means paying to cool an uninsulated box.

We insulate the shell. Anything involving extending your air conditioning into the garage belongs to a licensed air conditioning contractor, and we will say so rather than take the job.