Greater Lansing
Air sealing & draft proofing
Insulation slows heat. It does not stop air — which is why the draft at your ankles is caused by a hole in your ceiling, and why insulation laid over an unsealed attic underperforms whatever the bag says.
What is actually wrong
Insulation slows heat. It does not stop air. That one sentence is why this page exists and why it comes before the attic insulation page in the order of work, and it is the thing almost nobody is told before they buy a house full of insulation.
A house behaves like a chimney. Warm air rises, finds the gaps at the top, and leaves; the replacement is pulled in at the bottom, through the rim joist, the crawl space, the basement, around the sill. That is the stack effect, it runs harder the colder it gets, and it is the reason the draft you feel at your ankles is caused by a hole in your ceiling. Blowing insulation over an unsealed attic floor does not interrupt that loop — the air travels straight through the fiber, which is why people spend real money on insulation and report that the house feels much the same.
The gaps are not where people look either. They are the top plates of interior walls, plumbing and wiring penetrations, the chase behind a bath or around a chimney, the gap behind kneewalls, the dropped ceiling over a bathroom or a cupboard, recessed light fittings, and the attic hatch — which is frequently the single largest deliberate hole in the thermal envelope of the whole building. Almost none of them are visible from inside the house, and all of them are reachable from the attic before insulation goes down.
The diagnostic that finds them is a blower door, which depressurizes the house and makes the leaks measurable rather than a matter of opinion, usually alongside infrared imaging to see where cold is tracking in. Our team is completing BPI Building Analyst certification — the qualification the state’s rebate programs are built around — and registration as a Michigan Home Energy Rebates contractor is in progress. The energy rebates page sets out where each program stands and what can be applied for today.
And one specific thing that turns up constantly and is both a leak and a damage problem: bathroom and kitchen fans that discharge into the attic rather than out of the building. There is an invoiced job on the books where exactly that was found and put right — the fans had been ducted into a roof vent, which was replaced with two independent insulated runs to the gable, each with its own hood and backdraft damper. A fan venting into an attic is a hole in the ceiling that is also delivering a bathroom’s worth of moisture into the coldest part of the house.
Where this stops
When it is not a handyman job
This is at the top of the page rather than the bottom because getting it wrong costs you a wasted visit. Insured, and no contractor license is claimed or implied — the Michigan residential builder license is not held.
- Non-IC recessed light fittings must never be buried in insulation or sealed over — the clearance around them is a fire protection measure. They either get replaced with an airtight IC-rated fitting by a licensed electrician, or boxed with the clearance the fitting requires. Anyone willing to blow insulation over a ceiling full of old cans without raising this is a reason to stop the job.
- Knob-and-tube wiring in an attic is a stop. It was designed to shed its heat into open air, burying it in insulation is a fire risk, and it is a licensed electrician’s assessment before anything is sealed or covered. Old houses in this area still have it.
- Vermiculite insulation — loose gray-brown pellets, typically in a house from before about 1990 — is treated as asbestos-containing until a sample says otherwise. It does not get moved, vacuumed, swept or sealed over, and it is not this company’s work. Sampling comes first and the result decides who does anything next.
- Combustion safety is not optional and it is not ours to certify. Tightening a house changes the air available to a natural-draft furnace or water heater and can affect how its flue behaves. Where there is an atmospherically vented appliance, a combustion safety check belongs with a licensed mechanical contractor, and we will say so rather than seal around it and hope.
- No electrical work beyond like-for-like. Replacing a recessed fitting, moving a circuit or anything at a panel is a licensed electrician’s and is named on the quote rather than absorbed.
- Soffit intake ventilation is never blocked to fit more insulation in. Baffles go in first. Sealing a roof’s intake ventilation is how an insulation job turns into a moisture and ice dam job.
- Spray foam is not offered. Closed-cell and open-cell foam are a specialist install with their own equipment, curing and ventilation requirements, and getting it wrong is expensive to reverse rather than easy to top up.
- We do not guarantee an energy saving figure. A blower door number before and after is a real measurement and it will be given honestly; a predicted dollar saving depends on fuel price, weather and how a household lives, and anybody promising one is quoting a model as a fact.
- Rebate program participation is not claimed here. BPI Building Analyst certification is in progress and Michigan Home Energy Rebates contractor registration is in progress; the energy rebates page carries the current position on all four programs and what can be applied for today.
The work itself
What actually gets done
A walk through the attic, basement and crawl space with the specific leaks listed and photographed before anything is quoted.
Seal the attic floor properly: top plates of interior and exterior walls, wiring and plumbing penetrations, and the gaps around flues to the clearance the fitting requires.
Close the open chases — behind baths and showers, around chimneys, behind kneewalls, over dropped ceilings and soffits — which are the biggest single leaks in most houses and are nearly always open to the attic.
Build and seal an insulated, weatherstripped cover for the attic hatch, or fit a sealed hatch, because a bare hatch undoes a great deal of what is done around it.
Rim joist air sealing and insulation, the best value item in the basement or crawl space and the bottom end of the stack-effect loop.
Weatherstrip and adjust doors and windows, and seal around frames where the gap is in the structure rather than in the seal.
Seal around penetrations through exterior walls — dryer vents, service entries, hose bibs, cable and conduit.
Duct bathroom and kitchen fans to the outside properly where they currently empty into the attic or the soffit, with insulated runs, a proper hood and a backdraft damper.
Fit baffles at the eaves so the soffit intake ventilation stays open before any insulation goes in.
Written list and photographs of what was sealed and what was deliberately left, which is the record a rebate assessment and any later contractor will both want.
This work sits inside General Repairs, which carries the invoiced price bands for the trade with the sample size printed beside every figure.
What it costs
There is no price list for this, and here is what actually decides the number.
The same three words describe a twenty-minute job and a two-day one. Rather than publish a figure that is wrong for one of them, here is what moves it — so you can work out roughly which end of it you are at before anybody comes out.
How reachable the attic floor is. Low pitch, deep existing insulation, stored belongings and truss webs all slow it down more than area does.
How many chases and dropped ceilings there are. A plain rectangular attic over one story is the easy case; a 1920s one-and-a-half story with kneewalls and dormers is a different job.
Whether there are recessed light fittings in the ceiling below, and what type they are.
Whether the existing insulation has to be moved aside and put back, or taken out.
Whether the fan ducting has to be put right at the same time, which is usually worth doing while somebody is already up there.
The hatch, which is small, cheap and almost always worth doing.
Whether a blower door test before and after is wanted, which is the only way to put a number on what changed.
How to get a real number
Somebody comes out, looks at it properly, and you get a fixed price in writing with the work set out line by line and the exclusions written down as plainly as the inclusions. Coming out to do that is not charged for, and neither is working out what is wrong. If something is found once a wall or a floor is open, it is priced as a written change order and you decide before the work carries on rather than after it is billed. Materials are supplied at cost with the receipt attached, first-time customers get 10% off labor, and labor carries a one-year craftsmanship warranty.
If this is happening right now
What to do in the next five minutes, and what happens when you ring.
Before anybody arrives
- On the first properly cold day, walk the house with the back of your hand near the floor at exterior walls, at the rim joist in the basement, and around the attic hatch. Cold moving air is easy to feel and hard to argue with.
- Open the attic hatch and look at the perimeter. If you can see down the gaps between the ceiling joists and the top of the wall below, that is the leak.
- Count the recessed light fittings in your top-floor ceilings and look for a label inside one. Whether they are IC-rated changes what can be done above them.
- Find out where your bathroom fan actually goes. If there is no hood on an outside wall or through the roof, it is going into the attic.
- Look for loose gray-brown pellets rather than fiberglass or cellulose. If that is what is up there, close the hatch and do not go back in until it has been sampled.
- Do not fill the eaves with insulation to stop a draft. That is the roof’s intake ventilation and blocking it causes the exact problem you were trying to solve.
- If a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm has ever gone off for no obvious reason, mention it when you call. It changes the order of this work.
Call the business line
(517) 505-7135Answered Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00. There is no out-of-hours line and this page is not going to invent one — outside those hours, leave a message with the address and what is happening, and it is picked up in the morning.
On the call you get asked what is happening, what else in the building is affected, and whether it is still getting worse. That is how it gets decided whether this is our job at all — and if it is not, you get told that on the phone rather than after somebody has driven out.
- No trip charge
- No call-out fee or minimum
- No diagnostic fee
- No charge for a return visit
True across all 84 written quotes this company has issued. Most contractors in this market charge to turn up.
Or send the detailsWhen the right answer is not this company
- You can smell gas
- Leave the building and call the utility from outside. Not us, and not later.
- Water you cannot stop
- Your main shut-off first, then a licensed plumber. Every minute of this one costs money.
- Sewage backing up, or several fixtures at once
- A licensed plumber with a camera. That is the shared line, not a fixture, and a cable down one sink will not touch it.
- Sparking, scorching or a burning smell at an outlet or a panel
- Breaker off, and a licensed electrician. Electrical work here is repair and like-for-like replacement, and this is neither.
- No heat, or heating and cooling equipment that has failed
- A licensed mechanical contractor. That trade is not offered here at all, and knowing that in one phone call is worth more than a visit.
Questions people actually ask
Should I air seal before adding insulation?
Yes, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Insulation slows heat; it does not stop air, and air travels straight through fiberglass. A house works like a chimney — warm air leaves through gaps at the top and is replaced through gaps at the bottom — so blowing insulation over an unsealed attic floor leaves that loop running and the house feeling much the same. Seal the attic floor first, then insulate over it. Doing it the other way round means the sealing work is now buried under a foot of loose material and costs several times as much to reach.
Where does a house actually leak air?
Almost never where people look. The big ones are the top plates of interior walls, plumbing and wiring penetrations, open chases behind a bath or around a chimney, the gap behind kneewalls, dropped ceilings and soffits over bathrooms and cupboards, recessed light fittings, and the attic hatch — which is frequently the largest deliberate hole in the whole envelope. At the bottom of the house it is the rim joist and the sill. Windows and doors get the blame and are usually a small share of the total. None of the attic ones are visible from inside the house, which is why they survive decades of redecorating.
Why does my floor feel cold if the problem is in the ceiling?
Because of the stack effect. Warm air rises and escapes through gaps at the top of the house, and that air has to be replaced, so outside air is pulled in at the bottom — through the rim joist, the crawl space, around the sill and under doors. The draft at your ankles is the consequence of a hole in your ceiling. It runs harder the colder it gets outside, which is why a house can feel fine in October and draughty in January. Sealing the top of the house is usually what fixes the bottom of it.
Can you insulate over recessed lights?
Not over non-IC-rated ones, and this is a fire safety matter rather than a preference. Older recessed fittings are designed to shed their heat into clear air and the required clearance around them is part of how they stay safe; burying them in insulation or sealing over them removes that. The options are replacing them with airtight IC-rated fittings, which is a licensed electrician’s work, or boxing them to maintain the clearance. If a company quotes blowing insulation across a ceiling full of old cans and never raises this, that tells you what kind of job you are buying.
My bathroom fan vents into the attic. Does that matter?
A great deal, and it is extremely common. It is a hole in your ceiling that is also delivering a bathroom’s worth of warm, wet air into the coldest part of the house, where it condenses on the underside of the roof deck and on the framing. That is how attics grow mold and how insulation gets wet and stops working. There is an invoiced job on this company’s books where exactly that was found — fans ducted into a roof vent — and it was replaced with two independent insulated runs to the gable, each with its own hood and backdraft damper. It is worth doing at the same time as anything else in the attic.
What is a blower door test and do I need one?
It is a fan sealed into a doorway that depressurizes the house so the leakage can be measured rather than guessed at, usually run alongside infrared imaging to see where the cold is tracking. You do not need one to seal an attic hatch, but it is the only way to put a number on what a job changed, and it is the diagnostic the state rebate programs are built around. Our team is completing BPI Building Analyst certification, which is the qualification behind that assessment, and the position on each program is set out on the energy rebates page.
Will air sealing make my house too tight?
In a typical older Michigan house, no — these houses leak several times more than a modern one and sealing the attic floor does not get near the point where mechanical ventilation becomes necessary. The real concern is narrower and worth naming: tightening a house changes the air available to a natural-draft furnace or water heater, and that is a combustion safety question for a licensed mechanical contractor rather than something to assume away. Where there is an atmospherically vented appliance, that check comes first.
What does air sealing cost?
There is no rate card, because the same house can be an afternoon at the hatch and the top plates or several days of chases and kneewalls. It is set by how reachable the attic floor is, how many chases and dropped ceilings there are, whether there are recessed fittings to deal with, whether existing insulation has to be moved and put back, and whether the fan ducting is being put right at the same time. Somebody comes out, goes up there, photographs what they find and puts a fixed price in writing. Coming out is free.
Do you work in Lansing, Haslett, East Lansing, Okemos and Holt?
Yes — Greater Lansing and the towns around it, which is where almost all of this company’s work is.
Book an air sealing survey
Two things to tell us: where you feel the draft, and whether you know where your bathroom fan actually discharges. Somebody goes up into the attic, photographs the leaks and lists them before quoting anything. You get the photographs and the list either way. Coming out is free, and there is no trip charge.