Misinformation Followed Us Like a Plague

Well, I can see from the comments that my loopy descriptions of my home-brew insulation contraption have some people confused. I love confusing people. I’m on the internet. Confusion is about the only product on the web worth mentioning, coming in a close second to straight-up lies. I stick to confusion because I’m a terrible liar. Why I remember back when they tried to give me a Nobel Prize for Literature. I told them, I can’t lie, I have to turn it down because the medal will just clank against that Legion of Honour doodad the French gave me for a little dustup I got them out of in North Africa. True story.

Anyway, someone already hired someone else to bore holes in the outside of my house and blast loose insulation into the exterior wall cavities. I’m not doing any of that. That’s accomplished with a very big blower, which I don’t have or want. You have to bore a hole at both the top and bottom of each stud bay to get a good result, too. My house has enough holes in it without making more, thank you.

My apparatus is handier to make my way around my house on the interior and get everything they missed, which was a lot. There was no insulation in the carhole walls and ceiling, or the basement ceiling (the floor of the first floor of our house). There are dozens of opportunities to add insulation in my old barn. They’re all over the place, which is kind of the problem here.

You see, everyone involved treats everything as one big job. If you buy X-number of bales of insulation, the Orange Place will give you a free one-day rental of a blower. It won’t be there when you show up, and if it is, it will be broken, and if it’s not, it won’t work very well anyway, and it will due back one hour after you get it running, and you live an hour-and-a-half away, and the place closed 15 minutes ago.

Look at my ghetto rig again:

It’s just a box and a barrel and a hose. I can bring it anywhere in the house and use it. If you set it up anywhere near where the work is, the fifty foot hose reaches everything. When I’m not using it, I coil the hose inside the barrel and slip the plastic wands and the mixer into the center of the coil and it sleeps contentedly in the basement until I find a few spare minutes and a few errant shekels to insulate something.

So, how does it work, you’re asking? It’s simple, I’m telling you. You just need these two things to get going:

The insulation fabric is interesting. You can sorta see through it, but it’s pretty tough stuff. It doesn’t tear easily, so the staples hold it in place firmly. It’s not a vapor barrier, which is good. Insulation advice gets really weird on the topic of vapor barriers, In general, no permutation of them works very well, and if it does, it causes moisture problems somewhere you didn’t expect.

You’re not going to come out of this insulation battle alive without some help on the staple front. A regular hammer tacker would wear you out in no time, and using a lever operated staple gun would probably kill you. Well, the blisters on your hand would drive you to take your own life after an hour or so, which is much the same thing.

It’s hard to find anything online that shows the way the fabric gets installed. Anything that’s to the point, I mean. These fellows give it a go. We’ll start at the 5:49 mark, to skip the opening ceremonies:

He’s using a pneumatic stapler. He apparently owns stock in a big staple conglomerate, and it trying to pump up the stock price, I assume. I’ve found that you don’t really need that many fasteners to get a good seal going. And I’m not interested in dragging another hose around.

It’s even harder to find video of someone blowing in cellulose like I’m doing. Here’s the venerable Bob Vila presiding over a fiberglass version of the same sort of process I’m using for cellulose. Once again, I skipped the almost four minutes of opening folderol to get to the process itself:

Note that you cut X-shaped openings in the fabric, slightly larger than the hose. You’d think muscling the hose, and in our case, a hard plastic wand, through the hole in the fabric would tear it, but it doesn’t. We filled all the wall cavities in our carhole basement just like this fellow was doing. First, you push it down into the bottom of the bay, fill it up, and then reverse the direction of the wand and fill up the top half. We have to go slower than the last video shows because the leaf blower is powerful, but nowhere near what their pro blower puts out.

Here’s our carhole ceiling, with the insulation blown in. There are no holes visible, because I staple strips of leftover fabric over the holes to keep them from raining a little cellulose down if someone decides to rumba on the floor upstairs.

We did an experiment to see if this stuff was really dense-packed. We peeled back a section of wall, and pulled out some of the lower part, and the insulation above didn’t budge. We tried it again in a ceiling. If you remove the fabric, the insulation stays put. If you run your hand over the surface while you’re filling up the bays, you can feel it when it’s full. It feels like a very firm mattress if you do it right. The blower makes a different sound when it’s full, too. You learn pretty quick when to back off a little and fill somewhere else.

You have to box out around various obstacles, like this DWV cleanout, but it’s not hard. That pipe in the next picture is tied into our former Geyser of Excrement, by the way, and serves the kitchen and a bathroom upstairs.

As you can observe, we nailed strapping onto the joists and then drywalled the ceiling after it’s insulated. The walls get covered with OSB. The place is starting to look borderline orderly. You have to work around stuff in a basement, though, and the spiders are really angry about the whole affair.

These insulated pipes carry refrigerant to and fro to the heat pump. We removed the hangers gingerly, slipped the fabric behind them, and then put the hangers back up. That section of the ceiling isn’t filled with insulation yet. I’ll try to enlist some help and grab some video of us filling the joist bays when we do it.

[Thanks for reading and commenting at Sippican Cottage]

A Blunderbuss, Not a Rifle

Alright. Let’s get down to it. I freely admit I lied yesterday when I said I was going to use a leaf blower to insulate my house.

I do own an electric leaf blower. It was “free” when I bought two very expensive lithium-ion batteries to resurrect my old cordless ni-cad tools. I use it to clean the workshop. You just blast all the dust off of everything, and then run out of the room before you’re asphyxiated. The sawdust eventually ends up on the floor and you sweep it up. That’s thing’s a toy. For homebrew insulation tasks, you don’t exactly want a leaf blower. You want a blower/vacuum/mulcher. It’s not precisely the same thing. I got this thing:

I can’t remember if I cared that it made a 260 MPH breeze or huffed 340 cubic feet per minute of blower bad breath. One of those statistics, or both, gave me the idea that it was big enough to achieve the coveted 3.5 pounds per square foot dense-pack. This model had a metal impeller that you can see in the +6 image on the left. That baby’s gonna get a workout, so you don’t want a plastic one.

First, you remove the screen cover that protects you from sticking your finger or something worse into the impeller while you’re doing lawn cleanup. Then you replace it with that trumpet shaped tube. That’s the attachment for the vacuum/mulcher operation this thing excels at. We’re going to feed cellulose into that tube, and blow it out the black snout. With mucho modifications, of course.

First you get a big, heavy duty cardboard box. Like this:

It has to be heavy duty, because it’s going to get battered. We screwed the box to a scrap of OSB plywood. We cut a hole in the box the size of the plastic mulching tube, and pushed it through to click into the blower. Then we zip tied the handle of the blower to a 2×4 block which is screwed to the OSB as well. Pretty solid like that. The inside of the box looks like this:

We fill this box right up to the top when we’re really going. One person turns the blower on and off, and also pushes their arm through the insulation in the box to keep it feeding into the pipe. The blower is strong enough to suck in the insulation without any help, but it clears a hole around the pipe and then starves for material. You have to feed it, because it goes fast.

Here’s everything put together. We used three plastic wand extension attachments from shop vacs, one duct taped to the short nozzle on the snout of the leaf blower, and two on the business end of the long, reinforced hose. I’m not proud of the duct tape, but it’s an oval snout with a circular tube rammed over it. The duct tape made for instant air sealing. We used hose clamps to seal the hose to the plastic wands. You can buy hose like this online in lots of places.

The hose doesn’t work well when it’s all twisted up like it is in the picture. You have to stretch it out and make sure you only have gentle curves in it. And here’s where you can come a cropper if you’re not careful: Everyone in the videos I showed you yesterday wants to increase the pressure in the hose, and accomplishes this by stepping down each length of the apparatus until it gets to a very small whip hose at the end. That’s a recipe for constant clogs. It’s smarter to have the same diameter hose the whole way. At the end of the line, we put the last two plastic wands on backwards, so that the end flares out, like a trumpet. It’s a blunderbuss, not a rifle. We hardly ever get clogs that way, and never at the end.

The insulation comes in heavily compressed bales, so you can’t use it right out of the package.

We take the big barrel, and put about a third of a bale in it. Then we chuck a big mixing attachment into a big drill, and plunge it into the barrel.

We bought that one because we have a big drill with a chick big enough to handle it (oops, I meant chuck. My wife’s kinda petite), and it’s long enough to reach into the bottom of the barrel. If you were smarter than me, you could get a less hefty one and keep the carps out of your tunnels.

The paddle  loosens the packed insulation very effectively and quickly. It fluffs up nicely, making a full barrel out of the less than half a barrel you start out with. Then you dump it in the box. We have two big barrels standing by, and the box full, before we begin, because the work goes fast, and it’s tedious to stop and mix up a batch every few minutes. As you can infer from the duct tape on the side of the barrel, that mixing paddle beats the living bejeezus out of the barrel when it really gets going, and it will break your wrist if you’re not careful. But it gets stuff done.

[Tomorrow, we get stuff done]

Sippican the Blowhard

You know, I figgered this insulation racket all out before I began. I crunched numbers. I did enough research to get a fellowship. I was the Sippican Division of Weights and Measures for a solid month. Then I crumpled up the half a sheet of paper with the numbers on it and threw it away. I immediately forgot everything I’d discovered, because my mind is kind. I’d made up my mind what to do, and how to do it. Why remember how I got here?

Oh, yes, I’m trying to explain my thought process to the internet, which is like being on trial in front of a short bus convocation of the Doges of Venice. No one takes your word for anything. Citation please, is the first comment on anything you write, and the please is a lie. I’m supposed to find some article in a newspaper that lies about every other subject, but is no doubt right on the money about this one, so use it for a citation. Well, I ain’t gonna.

I will offer a couple of observations, however. First, cellulose makes for good, cheap, fairly easy to handle insulation. It’s just ground up newsprint and packaging cardboard, treated with some sort of borate that makes it non-tasty for bugs and keeps it from burning. No, really, it’s paper, but it absolutely won’t burn.

As usual, there’s maybe four minutes of information spread over sixteen minutes of that video, but who am I to quibble? I’ve written about 125,000 words about fixing my house in the last three months, and it’s still not insulated. Mr Hockey Forward Haircut in the video lays a penny on the cellulose and blasts it with a torch until it’s molten, and it barely scorches the insulation. I hope the dude had an IQ over 125 before he started, because he’s bound to shed about 25 points after breathing the fumes from the burning foam stuff.

You can find any number of internet wags that will tell you that, yeah, sure, but after it gets wet, the fireproofing leaches out. I’m an internet wag, and I’m all wet, but I can assure you it’s not true. The borate doesn’t leach out. It’s really not toxic to humans, either. Fairly benign stuff in the scheme of things.

So cellulose is cheap, and it’s safe, and it’s more or less easy to install. What’s the catch? Well, the foam fellers will tell you that it’s worth it to pay 12 times as much for their product, because of air infiltration. Foam seals everything up. Air passes through loose-fill insulation. Case closed, they say.

Not so fast. If you just blast loose-fill insulation into your attic into a thick, fluffy blanket over the ceiling downstairs, some air will pass through it, it’s true. But we’re not going to loose-fill anything. We’re going to densely pack the cellulose, and dense-packed cellulose is a pretty efficient air barrier. It’s not like a sheet of plastic or anything, but it’s miles better than fiberglass batts, and close enough to foam to forget the difference. The key is how to densely pack it.

Dense-packed cellulose insulation has a pretty easy definition. You have to achieve between 3-1/2-lb. to 4-lb. per-cu.-ft. density. You can figure out if you’ve got enough pressure and technique by trying an area, then wrecking your work, and then weighing how much insulation falls out. No thanks. You can decipher the chart on the bales of insulation to figure it out. The maximum coverage per bag by wall or ceiling cavity depth works pretty well. Helps you to purchase the right amount, which you never do no matter how much measuring you do. Here’s a pretty good explanation of what’s going on from a manufacturer of the stuff:

Regular reader and commenter Mike Anderson pointed out a Fine Homebuilding article that lays out dense-packed insulation techniques pretty well. The pictures are a lot better than anything you’ll ever see on this blog. Of course the author, an insulation contractor, has to say:

Don’t try this at home

Although some DIYer’s claim success dense-packing cellulose with rental machines from home centers, these low-pressure machines make the process very slow and achieving a density sufficient to resist settling is difficult. The process is best left to
a specialty subcontractor with a more powerful insulation blower.

This is called begging the question. Who says I’m going to use the rental machine at the home center to do it? I ain’t. And I’m not going to buy a $20,000 contractor-grade blower, and buy a truck to install it in, either. I’m not going to hire anyone to do the work. I’m going to use a leaf blower.

[To be continued]

‘Assorted Gummy Putties’ Is the Name of My Green Day Tribute Band. But I Digress

Well, now I have a problem. Yesterday I asked readers what they wanted to hear about next, and insulation came in second. “Put a sock in it” came in first, of course. I’ll explain. If you’re like me, you assume that all the empty chairs at the town meeting are voting no, and only the twelve teachers and DPW worker’s spouses in the front row are voting yes. So second place wins at Sippican Cottage, just like in elections.

What’s the problem, you ask? Well, I don’t have any pictures of our insulation extravaganza. Not a one, I don’t think. However, unlike all the other hoary anecdotes about remodeling I’ve been palming off on you lately, I’m still performing this task. I live in western Maine, and it gets pretty cold here. In the summer. Let’s not discuss February, if you don’t mind. So I could actually take some photos and write some material, hot off the remodeling press. That sounds like work. I think I’m getting hives. But the internet has spoken. Let me tell you what we’re doing to keep the food in the refrigerator from freezing in the winter. I refused on principle to put a heater inside my fridge, so insulation was in order. But what kind?

First, let’s talk about what we inherited when we bought our $24,000 house. We did ourselves a favor buying a house so cheaply, of course, but we also did a good turn for the bank manager who unloaded the foreclosed pile on us. We went into his office and said we’d buy the old dustcatcher, and that prompted him to take the noose from around his neck and climb down from his office chair. A win/win situation.

In some respects, the insulation in our home was pretty good. Way back in the mists of time, someone had hired someone halfway competent to blow what looks like rock wool insulation into many of the exterior walls, and most of the attic. This was accomplished by removing some of the clapboard siding, drilling holes in the solid wood sheathing, and using a very strong blower to fill up the spaces between the studs and joists. They replaced the siding and there was no outward sign of their ministrations. Good stuff.

I say I think it was rock wool. Rock wool and cellulose look about the same, but generally cellulose is made from shredded newsprint, and there was nothing printed on the bits of insulation. Neither type will burn, either, so testing it like that wouldn’t work. There were some rock wool batts of the same vintage installed in the ceiling of the basement (the floor of the main floor). Crazy people had removed most of them, but the few that were left had labels. It certainly tasted like rock wool. I’ve gotten many mouthfuls of it over the years while fixing old houses. Pro Tip: Don’t look straight up while performing demolition.

Other than the patchy application of blown-in insulation, the house was a horrorshow of misdirected caulk, and sticky tape residue, and unemployed staples, and fluttering sheets of plastic, and oakum, and spray foam crack filler, and assorted gummy putties rammed willy-nilly into cracks. The former occupants were fascinated with saving energy, and expended a lot of energy trying unsuccessfully to do so. They put little bits of duct tape over keyholes to keep out drafts, and thought it would work. So we were going to have to continue the insulation project from the forties or fifties or whenever the blown-in job was performed, while peeling back the wreckage of umpteen failed attempts to try to weatherstrip the place to death. In general, everything looked about like this:

And this:

And this-a here:

And of course:

There was no central theme to the insulation story. It was R-value delirium tremens all the way through. Plenty of fire hazards, too. The tan paper faces on those fiberglass batts might as well be made from rolling papers, which I’m certain the former occupants were quite familiar with. And all of it was so spotty and ill-fitted that it accomplished next to nothing. We’ll have to find a way to insulate very large areas of the house, and spend next to nothing doing it. I swear, we found a way. I also swore plenty while doing it.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting. Please tell an internet friend about Sippican Cottage}