Failing to properly insulate your home can ship your electricity bill sky high, but also the ideal time to do it is before you finish the walls. When you are living in a home with exterior insulation that leaves something to be desired, your best option — brief of finding the walls — would be to blow insulation into them. The procedure involves creating holes in the walls, either from inside or outside the house, but they’re usually easy to hide.
Kinds of Loose-Fill Insulation
As long as they make fiberglass batt insulation, producers make loose-fill insulation from fiberglass. While it’s a fantastic insulation value and also resists mold and moisture, it can produce floating particles from the air that are dangerous to breathe included in specific netting inside the wall. Cellulose, made from recycled materials like paper and hardened and hardened using fire-resistant substances, is a greener choice. It is heavier than fiberglass, nevertheless, so to prevent it from clumping in walls and losing its insulation value, producers may treat it with a tiny quantity of adhesive.
Blowing-In from Interior
The machine that blows the fiberglass or cellulose insulation into the walls includes a large hopper to hold stuff and also a long hose with a nozzle about 2 inches in diameter. You will need to make holes for the nozzle — usually using a hole saw between each pair of studs in the wall you are filling. The holes are usually mid-way the wall up and at the very top to supply regulate the density in each wall cavity. Patching the holes isn’t hard to perform if you save every single cut-out. You can fit it back in place and cover it with drywall tape and joint compound.
Blowing-In from Outside
If you live in a house with plaster walls, then it may be better to blow insulation from outside, as long as the house has vinyl, wood or metallic siding that you can readily remove. The procedure is the same, except that you make the holes in the plywood sheathing. A fantastic method to categorize the holes will be to fit each cut-out back in the hole from which you took it and cover it with patching compound, which becomes rock-hard as it sets. Cover the stain with tar paper and replace the siding that you removed to get the sheathing.
Considerations
As you don’t have the opportunity to set up a moisture barrier in a wall that’s already covered, then there’s a possibility that the insulation will probably get moist. The shouldn’t produce a mould problem if it’s been properly treated, but it may make the insulation clump. Even if the insulation remains dry, then it will probably settle as much as 20 percent within a year or two. Clumping and settling affect the insulation value and may cause the need for much more insulation, so if you have a contractor at work, it is wise to find a warranty.