Soon after we purchased our home in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, I started to investigate how to make the house more energy efficient, and in particular how to protect ourselves against excess heat from the sun during summer months. So I started looking into radiant heat barriers. Some companies spray on Aluminum based paint to the underside of the attic rafters. Others will lay out aluminum foil on the attic floor. These approaches are mostly ineffective, but companies sell them because they don’t require much labor and are therefore less expensive and easier to sell. But the best way to install foil is tacked to the underside of the attic rafters, with good ventilation at the top and bottom to direct heated air up and out of the attic.

The best companies out there offer to install the foil for about $1.50 per square foot, which on our home would amount to almost $4,000! This was way out our budget, so I decided to buy the material over the Internet at atticfoil.com. The cost was only $400, and I was able to hire an off-duty fireman to help me install it – I got his name and phone number from this same web site. The final bill was about a third the cost of the original estimate, and I had extra insulation laid down at the same time.

We installed the foil at the height of summer and saw our electric bills come down as a result. The house is cooler, and we’ve only had to run one of our air conditioning units to keep the place at 78 degrees when it’s over 90 degrees outside. Please feel free to share your experiences with attic foil here.