The room over the garage is the most complained-about room in modern Alberta housing, and the subdivision and acreage building around Clairmont produced a great many of them. It is also the most misdiagnosed. People report it as the upstairs being cold and assume the attic is the problem, when the attic is usually fine and the room is losing heat through surfaces no other bedroom in the house has.
Five cold sides instead of one
An ordinary bedroom has one exterior wall and a ceiling with a heated house below it. A bonus room over a garage has two or three exterior walls, a sloped or vaulted ceiling against the roof, knee walls at the sides with unconditioned attic space behind them, and a floor sitting directly over an unheated garage. Almost every surface of the room faces something cold. That is why it behaves differently from the rest of the storey and why doing more to the main attic changes nothing.
The floor over the garage is the part people miss
Below the floor is a garage that is typically at or near outdoor temperature, and between them is a joist space that was often insulated by pushing batt up between the joists and holding it there with the garage ceiling drywall. Batt in that position sags, leaves gaps at the edges, and does nothing to seal the joist bays, which run horizontally out to the exterior rim and admit outdoor air along their length. Closed cell foam sprayed into those bays, bonded to the subfloor above and sealing each bay at its end, is the item that changes the feel of that room more than any other.
Knee walls back onto outdoors
At the sides of the room, where the sloped ceiling meets the vertical wall, there is a short wall with attic space behind it. That wall is an exterior wall in every meaningful sense, and it is very commonly insulated with batt that was never covered on the attic side, leaving it exposed to air movement in the triangular space behind. The floor cavity under that triangle is another route for outdoor air to run straight under the room. Both need sealing, and both are reached from the attic side rather than from inside the room.
A long season turns a design flaw into a daily complaint
In a climate with mild winters an under-performing bonus room would be a minor annoyance. Here the heating season is long and does not relent, so the room is uncomfortable for a large share of the year, and it is often the room given to a child or used as an office. The same geometry works against it in summer, when the roof above it is loading heat into a room with poor coupling to the rest of the house.
Heating is half the problem and sealing is the other half
Even with a good envelope, a bonus room frequently has one supply duct at the end of the longest run in the system and little or no return, so air goes in and has nowhere to go. Sealing and insulating properly reduces the load enough that a modest supply can actually hold the room, which is why the envelope work is worth doing first. But if the room has no return path at all, that is worth raising with whoever maintains the furnace, because insulation will not fix a duct that was never balanced.
We take care of the work
On bonus room spray foam insulation Clairmont, the people who quote the work are the people who do it. We insulate it ourselves and we answer for the result.
Bonus Room Spray Foam Insulation Clairmont: Common Questions
Why is only that room cold? Because it has cold on nearly every side, including underneath, where no other bedroom does. The main attic is usually not the problem.
What is the single most useful item? The floor over the garage. Sealing and insulating those joist bays changes that room more than anything done above it.
Do the knee walls need work? Usually. They are exterior walls with attic behind them, and the cavity under the triangle behind them is another path for outdoor air to run beneath the floor.
How much does bonus room spray foam insulation cost in Clairmont? It follows the sprayed area across the floor bays, the knee walls and the ceiling, and the available access decides how much of that is reachable without opening finishes.
Who does bonus room spray foam insulation in Clairmont? We do. We look at all five surfaces, say which ones are reachable, quote that work, schedule it and stand behind it.
Size the job with the R-value calculator, then get a free Clairmont quote. More on Bonus Room Spray Foam Insulation Alberta province-wide.