What Alberta Actually Requires, And Why Your Attic Probably Isn’t There
Almost every homeowner we meet believes their attic was “done properly.” Most of them are right about what was installed, and wrong about what is up there now.
Edmonton is climate zone 7A
A new home built here needs an effective R‑59 attic — or about R‑49.2 if the house has an HRV, because the code trades approved mechanical ventilation against envelope performance. Neither of those is cutting corners; they are two routes to the same compliant house. The full explanation, including where those numbers come from, is in our guide to what Alberta code requires in an attic.
“Effective” is doing a lot of work in that sentence
A nominal R‑60 attic does not deliver R‑60 evenly across your ceiling. Joists conduct heat, the material thins at the edges, and the code number already assumes all of that. It is why a genuinely compliant attic is usually blown deeper than the coverage chart on the bag would suggest — and why a tape measure at the hatch is not the same thing as a proper set of readings.
Settling is the part nobody accounts for
This is the finding that surprises people most. An attic blown to R‑40 in 1998 has spent nearly thirty years compacting under its own weight while wind at the eaves scours the perimeter. Measured today, that attic frequently reads like R‑25. The paperwork in your file and the ruler in your insulation are describing two different attics, and only one of them is heating your house.
R-50 or R-60?
Either is a defensible answer. The first R‑20 does most of the work, so the extra ten saves comparatively little on its own. But once you have paid for the crew, the trailer and the mobilisation, that last stretch is almost entirely material — it is the cheapest R-value in the whole job. If budget decides it, R‑50 is not a compromise; it is the threshold the rebate programmes themselves chose.
What we won’t do
Walls. We do attics, and only attics — drill-and-fill wall insulation is a different job with different risks in an older Alberta home, and we would rather be good at one thing. We also will not touch vermiculite: in a pre-1990 attic it may contain asbestos, removing it is licensed abatement work in this province, and we are not that contractor. If we find it you get photographs, an explanation, and no invoice.
The measurement is free because the answer is often “no”
We would rather drive out, take the readings, hand you the photographs and tell you your attic is fine than talk you into fourteen inches you don’t need. The homes that genuinely need this are obvious once somebody actually looks.
