Hi all,
I am in need of some advice regarding diy wall insulation for my currently uninsulated house. The situation is like this: The house is 80y/o, wooden frame, stucco siding. My main concerns are minimizing wall damage, and minimizing fire-spread risk.
For these reasons, I had wanted to go with blown-in mineral wool, but the olny 2 brands I could find (Rockwool and ThermaFibre) have discontinued their blown insulation. I’ve heard about using perlite for insulation, but it seems that it’s a bad idea for drywall due to how loose the grains are (drill a hole, lose your insulation), and the only advice for binding it is to use concrete, which is probably way too heavy (and permanent) for use inside drywall. I also can’t add insulation externally because of the stucco siding.
I’m really at a loss here. I feel like my requirements aren’t so unusual that there isn’t already some product or technique out there to cover my use case, but I can’t find anything still in production. If anybody has any ideas whatsoever, I’d love to hear them.
UPDATE: I did start looking into the sheeps wool recommendations, HOWEVER, in that time I found scrap mineral wool available from ATS that I’ll be able to use as loose fill. Thanks for trying to help, everyone!
You’ll have to buy a machine to heat and mix the chemicals, but two-part urethane foam insulates like crazy and only requires small holes in the wall.
Isn’t urethane foam really flammable though? That’s why I’ve been avoiding it, fiberglass, and organic types of blown insulation.
Fiberglass isn’t flammable? Or were you avoiding it for some other reason?
Okay, my mistake I did forget it was inflammable, but yeah, there are other issues with using it for my house, like rodents using it as a nest, and it disintegrating after a few years, which would require me to open the walls to extract it later. Longevity was another reason I was leaning towards mineral wool and perlite.
Fiberglass insulation is not inflammable (which means the same thing as flammable), it is fire-resistant. But yeah if you’ve got the money mineral wool is really good.
But my problem is that the only mineral wool manufacturers I know of have discontinued their loose fill products, hence the post
YOU!! ARE A LIFESAVER!! Thank you very much!
Loose-fill insulation is not great in vertical applications. If you can afford it get spray foam. Otherwise you’re probably best off with basic fiberglass batts.
