Which Lehi homes have empty walls
Wall insulation was not standard practice in Utah until the 1970s, and it was thin until the 1990s. The house's age tells us most of what to expect.
The older homes near Main Street and Center Street, the pioneer-era and mid-century houses in Lehi's original grid, and the first tracts built north of the freeway commonly have no wall insulation at all. Plaster or drywall, an empty stud cavity, sheathing, and siding. On a January morning you can feel it by putting a hand on an exterior wall.
Homes from the 1970s and 1980s usually have thin fiberglass batts, often R-11, sometimes poorly fitted with gaps at the top and around wiring. Those walls can be dense-packed too. The fill tube compresses the old batt and fills the remaining space.
Homes built from the 1990s on, including nearly everything on Traverse Mountain, in Holbrook Farms, and around Thanksgiving Point, were built with R-13 to R-21 batts and are rarely worth retrofitting. For those homes the money is better spent in the attic and at the rim joist.
How we check before we quote
We do not quote a whole house on the assumption that every wall is empty. During the inspection we check a bay or two: an outlet box on an exterior wall with the breaker off, a small inspection hole in a closet or behind a door, or the open cavities in an unfinished basement or garage that share a wall with the house. If some walls are insulated and some are not, the quote covers only the empty ones.
