by Jon Ferguson

Created on: December 09, 2011

Insulating your basement is an important part of having a healthy and efficient home.  Not only do you create a year around habitable space you improve thermal performance of the entire dwelling.  This will definitely reduce your heating bills in the cold season.  Other benefits are eliminating the kind of damp environments that encourage mold and mildew and greatly reducing the chances of having frozen pipes.  Insulation protects the foundation of your house from frost heaving which can crack and destroy your home.

Most people think making their home more efficient is mostly insulation, this is partially right.  Insulation is only half of what makes your home efficiently warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  The other half of the equation is known as 'Thermal Mass'.  Mass in terms of residential construction is essentially any hard, dense, heavy material.  A concrete block is a good example of thermal mass.  Greater mass means the greater potential to store heat, kind of like storing power in a battery.  Dense materials such as concrete store and transmit/conduct heat quite well. 

You want to create an environment where once you heat up a space it stays heated as long as possible or conversely once you cool down a space it stays cool as long as possible.  Most basements these days are manufactured with mortared concrete block or poured in place concrete. Fortunately concrete is great for thermal mass because it is heavy, dense, and can store a lot BTU's (British thermal units)* for a long time.  So the good news is in your basement you already have a very large amount of thermal mass that your home can use to store energy. 

Unfortunately we mustn't forget the other half of the efficiency equation the Insulation. Without insulation the concrete in your basement will simply conduct heat from the interior of your house into the cold damp ground around it.  When insulating a block wall you essentially have three methods.  I will rank them in order of good, better, best.

First the good, you can insulate the interior side of the block.  This is the easiest and cheapest thing you can do.  Many methods of doing this are available from spray on foam, to putting up studs and fiberglass.  Rigid insulation board can be glued or screwed to the interior of the wall as well.  But it comes in lowest on our list because you have just created a thermal barrier between

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