Why are insulation contractors in my area no longer offering cellulose?
Just curious here… I’ve called 4 insulation contractors in my area, and none of them offer cellulose anymore. I actually had a “….but it says on your website” moment with one of them, which stumped the sales guy.
Has anyone experienced this in their area, and does anyone know why this is?
I’ve got some hand-waving answers about air quality and particle size, but I’m starting to think it’s because it’s not lucrative enough compared to blown fiberglass or spray foam.
“Nobody does that anymore around here” sounds like it points to something very specific to the local market.
To be fair, the market is mostly code-minimum tract homes with fancy kitchen/bath finishes, or very expensive custom infill houses or lake homes. Charlotte is weird.
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I'd recommend you try calling your local building department and ask them. The building dept people will have a good idea of what the contractors in your area do, and they'll certainly know if there is anything restricting the use of cellulose in your area.
I'm not aware of any issues with cellulose myself, and there are many contractors in my area who install the stuff -- although I can't claim to have talked to any of them in the past few months or so.
Bill
It's pretty odd. I called these particular installers because their websites advertise it, but got the "we don't do that anymore" type response, and no one mentioned a solid reason like code changes (which would be the easy out if that was an actual reason).
I take that back. After calling a half dozen places, I found one who installs cellulose, and does almost no fiberglass. So now I'm confused, but convinced there must be some reason to explain this in our market.
Regardless, I have at least one option now.
It's entirely possible that the contractors are just doing what the market demands. If everyone is asking for fiberglass to be installed, contractors will eventually just do that.
I have run into many people who think fiberglass is in some way superior to cellulose, and I have to explain that fiberglass really only has two advantages over cellulose: 1, it can dry out if it gets wet, and 2, it's lighter weight. Cellulose is superior in insulating ability, air sealing (or at least "air restricting"), and it's cheaper too. I pretty much only use loose fill fiberglass when I'm worried about weight on old drywall.
Bill
We initially specified cellulose and were told:
1. Insurance rates are much higher for insulators that do more than XX (I was told XX = 30%) cellulose versus fiberglass. It's possible to get cellulose, but they don't like doing it.
and
2. The quality of cellulose insulation has declined. There is now much less newspaper and more cardboard and "lower quality" cellulose available in dense pack cellulose products. This makes it more difficult to do dense pack cellulose and not have it sag.
We were also told a few other things that I question. I'm not saying either of the statements above are true, only that's what the contractor our GC hired told us. In the end, we did spray foam (with a low GHG product, as required here) with dense pack fiberglass. We clearly have a very good (and expensive) insulation package. The spray foam, which I was initially against, really glues things together and totally seals a number of problematic areas so I'm considerable more open to it now than I was before it was installed.
my contractor told me he quit cellulose because we were getting too humid and the fiberglass absorbs less water than cellulose. After removing all of the old 45 year old cellulose we air sealed the attic and blew in 17 inches of fiberglass.