Gale Tedhams: Hi! I'm Gale Tedhams with Owens Corning and I'm talking about how to insulate your attic. In this segment, we'll talk about how to insulate around your vents, your soffit vents and make sure your attic retains it's good ventilation. We'll also talk about how to insulate around heat producing devices such as can light or chimney flues that are coming up through your attic. Proper ventilation in an attic is really important, and typically attics have eave vents or Soffit vents that are along the bottom of the roof line, that direct air up to the hip or the ridge line of the roof. In order to protect those vents and make sure that they don't get blocked by the insulation that we're installing, we use rafter made baffles that assure that, that ventilation space will remain open after we insulate.

Now, you might have can lights coming up through the ceiling and into the attic's space, and you have to take care when your insulating around those to notice whether or not it says IC on the can light. If it says IC that means Insulation Contact, that means you can insulate around the can light however, if it does not say IC then you should keep the insulation at least three-inches away from the can light. You might have also flues or chimneys coming out through your attic from fire places or other heat producing devices, and if it's a metal flue, you should again keep the insulation three-inches away from the chimney. However, if it's a masonry chimney, which doesn't tend to be as so hot, you can put unfaced, no paper but unfaced insulation right next to it, since Fiberglass insulation is naturally fire resistant.

Now that I've shown you how to insulate your attic, there's one thing to finish it off. We need to insulate the attic stairway.