3 (little known) Benefits of Rockwool Insulation

what's up guys i'm matt risinger and i'm travis brungart and travis and i are in west virginia we're at the experience center right before we take a factory tour of the rockwool plant but we thought we'd go through three little-known benefits of rockwell really the big reasons why we've moved to rockwell as our main installation for our houses today's build show is sponsored by rockwool let's get going [Music] all right travis talk to me about fire benefit you know this is a display that we see a lot of trade shows and really draws you in but what is it about fire and that benefit that appeals to you well with a move to exterior continuous insulation i love the idea of having my home and its occupants protected from wildfires we don't have a significant wildfire risk in kansas where i'm at but certainly the wee areas out west uh this is a huge benefit and for me when i think about rockwool having some fire resistance i think about it on the interior of the building now your drywall is going to cover these studs most of the time right you don't normally have stud bays that are open but where this might really benefit you is where you've got unfinished basements you've got eye joists and those eye joists by code need to be covered and so if you can think about those joists sticking down in a basement especially the osb on an eye joist is really vulnerable to fire and so covering that with safe and sound or another product like that from rockwool is going to provide that fire resistance especially to those osb band joists all right first up i think one of the little known benefits of rockwool is this display right here what are we seeing travis here we're watching water vapor move through the material a lot of builders and frankly a lot of designers get hung up on the complexities of vapor movement vapor drive where's my vapor barrier do i want a vapor retarder or a barrier it can be very confusing if you if you have those barriers in the wrong place you have a lot of risk yeah so what we believe in is a vapor open system uh and what rockwell allows us to do is to dry omnidirectionally both ways yep in out doesn't care what season you know obviously you know warm and winter side on some installations is a big deal we eliminate that risk by having the rockwool product in the wall it does not care where it's at it doesn't care what season it is it can always dry i love it number two for me this is a big deal in texas is that this insulation will not house bugs and in fact bugs get destroyed as they go through it there's some really cool white paper i'll link to below which did a termite study and basically showed how termites will not nest in nor will they move through rock wool so much so that you've actually used below-grade rockwool right we use a ton of it below grade uh mice won't burrow into it we actually had to store some exterior which is not an approved way to store your rockwell you should not do that but we didn't have indoor storage yet so we were storing on site uh they ate through the plastic at the exterior of the package to try and move in and stay warm and then they moved out because you don't eat rocks they didn't like it no that's awesome and travis what's number three for us number three is the workability the main thing that drew joe and i to using rockwell initially was that we were self-performing and we did that because we wanted to make sure we had a good install and it's very important for a fibrous insulation to touch all all sides of the cavity in order to get that install what we were seeing from our subcontractors was a lot of times there'd be a paper stretched across the face of the suds and stapled up well if the guys don't slice the bats they don't tuck in behind the boxes you don't have a good thermal control layer you now have voids you have places for convective looping you have all sorts of problems but you can't see that yeah so with this product we were self-performing we were getting a really quality install and we can immediately ascertain if we subcontract that install just on an immediate visual inspection any dark area any void any shadow line in complete install you got to tuck it tight you it's so dense you can't fold it around the wire and not fill the cavity you've got to slice that back to go around your wires you've got to work around your pipes so that's our main thing and then you and i were talking earlier about actually working with it it's not like a light fiberglass material where it hangs in the air the fibers are heavy they drop out of the air quickly so if you are cutting it you don't really have that extended interval of unpleasant work conditions yeah when you go to a house that has exposed rockwool you don't have that feeling of their stuff in the air so much so that in fact in my attic i have unfaced uh bats you know i have no covering over them in my rafters let's go take a look at some of the displays they've got because i really like showing the assemblies let me show you all right travis we've got some rockwool insulation here two different types of rockwell insulation as a matter of fact talk to me about this display this actually reflects most accurately what we do in most of our assemblies now uh everyone's moving to exterior insulation super important uh code's going that way this is the comfort board r12 product so this is three inches of uh comfort board 80 actually i believe so this is uh eight pounds per cubic foot uh so it's a high density product and it allows for us to put a furring strip on top screw through into the structure we now have a rain screen benefit for and you can do this on an open joint cladding as well if you like but that allows for your exterior insulation to be continuous and it makes for a fast install we actually get our framers to do it behind that we have our water resistant barrier and then in our cavities we're typically doing a two by six frame so we get the r23 comfort bat so we still get acoustic and fire benefit out again the pest resistance that we've talked about and then we're also getting the higher r value by having it on both sides of our wrb and sheathing and this really shows the vapor open benefit that we just talked about a minute ago with that steam generator steaming through that if inside this house we had elevated moisture levels let's say in the winter time in kansas city where it's 20 degrees out there could be some drying to the outside in this assembly because there's nothing to stop that drying we've got wood sheathing wood studs and we've got cavity rock wool insulation here and then the comfort board on the outside can also have that steam just like on the display or in this case vapor drive through that to dry to the outside and the reverse is true in the summertime we can drive through these products to the inside as well so this is a really safe assembly and that's one of the things i really like about rockwool is that you don't have this vapor barrier or vapor retarder it's a very safe assembly in your houses very low that being said let's check out the commercial displays now i know most of you guys watching this are residential builders like travis and i but it's really interesting to see how the commercial guys do it so we've got steel studs which are highly conductive right we make wiring out of uh metals and when we make steel or studs out of metals those are pretty conductive so we've got to have some really good exterior insulation and this is a product i frankly didn't know about till recently this is called cavity rock black and so this is an exterior rock wool insulation that has a black facer on it so that if you have an open joint rain screen you would see black back there talk about talk to me about these though travis what is that so this is a fiberglass gert and this is uh basically doing the opposite of what you're concerned with here instead of being highly conductive and allowing the thermal energy to transfer through the system this actually is reducing that thermal transfer while also being an easy way to mount your product on your exterior yeah it's a fast uh support for both your exterior cladding and your insulation in one step that's cool and then they're tied back to the building also with a thermally broken fiberglass type clip all right next assembly this is one we see in commercial projects all over the place if you look down the side here you can see the clip that they're using on here or the not the clip the brick tie rather this is a two-piece tie so there's a screw that goes into the stud and then you put this wire tie in between your big courses and that's going to hold that brick on the wall but this is a great assembly too it looks like a prosico fluid applied on top of gypsum sheathing and again we've got some rockwool cavity insulation but this cavity rock on the outside is really doing the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to actually insulating that building it's like putting a big sweater or a big coat on in the wintertime it's going to really keep that building nice and warm and then mine lastly talk to me about this we do this all the time so for our interiors of our basements we're a basement market in kansas city we're always going up with comfort board on the interior of the wall it's really fast to install because we can use a ram set or similar powder actuated and basically attach comfort board in huge panels pop pop for it four by eight sheets all the way across the wall here they've installed an intelli smart vapor retarder across that we do our vapor control the exterior of our foundation walls but the the principles are the same you want to control that because it's vapor open product i really am not worried about that i don't have a risk either way but then we frame our interior basement wall and do all our mechanicals our wiring runs through there and then we still go ahead and insulate through the cavity again to get maximum thermal benefit uh and then your drywall finish and baseboard is standard interior design with some really good displays it's great i like it now in the past when i've seen rockwool displays at uh rockwell insulation displays at trade shows we've talked a lot about fire benefits and they have a fire one over here that shows how that flame underneath that rock wool doesn't melt it but when you think of the fire been a benefit of rockwool insulation what's the benefit to you well for me i'm a master electrician we do a lot of our own wiring and most of the electrical code is driven by nfpa and they're worried about fire starting in boxes and then spreading into the wall cavity so even on an interior wall cavity where you would have a safe and sound insulation product for sound deadening you also get that that fire resistance benefit because i think the melting point of rock was like 2200 degrees so that's on interior walls at exterior walls again you've basically eliminated flame spread because there's not a volume of air moving through the product you're not going to get any of that and then of course the high melting point so it's a fantastic solution for that as well i mean rocks don't burn this insulation's made from rocks it's right in the name that's where that benefit comes from the other thing that i don't think many people think of travis is when you put that exterior rockwool insulation on the comfort board 80 you've got this big thick blanket of a more fire resistant material which is going to keep your wood framing protected in wildfire areas and so i think there's a huge wildfire benefit to rockwool insulation they call that the wui i don't know how you pronounce it the wild wildfire no wildlands urban interface i believe is what it stands for and this is code and becoming more code in more and more places in america but the other big benefit i don't think many people think of is eye joist you know when you've got an unfinished basement and you framed with ijoyce on your first level we need to cover those eye joists because in particular the osb webbing on those is particularly vulnerable to fire issues and if you had a fire that started in the basement the webbing would burn quicker than the solid top and bottom plates so by using safe and sound in those areas you can meet the code benefit or the code requirement i should say for fire resistance for those ijoys without having to go to the expense of running sheetrock in those places yeah and that that's an excellent point because typically when we have our our unfinished spaces typically where your mechanicals are in our basements uh where we're doing this comfort board we no longer have to put up drywall as you would if you used a foam plastic insulation that would cause uh if it were to burn uh severe off-gassing and kill the occupants before they even had a chance to get out of the house you can leave that exposed and we do that frequently so it's a real nice benefit and then you lose that echoey basement too you know what i need to go talk to some guys in the corner but while i'm doing that why don't you go show these guys the uh the sound tunnel here at the experience yeah let's go check it out all right sounds good we'll see you over there so matt's awfully loud out here telling stories and joking around with the guys but check this out it's a sustainable reading out here so matt's out there talking about ad revenue on a video and we're in here not hearing a word of what he's got to say check how quiet it is in here less than half as loud the safe and sound product allows that to happen just like all the cavity rock does any insulation that you put in your wall is going to have some sound deadening effect but this stuff is particularly useful and that's why sound engineers have favored it for years the acoustic benefit of the rockwool product is legendary travis was i really pretty loud yeah man you're hitting 80 90 decibels out here i tend to be a little bit loud that is true super cool experience center here at the rockwool factory stay tuned for our next video where travis and i are going to kind of walk you through the process but before we leave what are all these jars here on the way out this is what's in this so the way that rockwell is made the stonewall insulation that they manufacture involves primarily basalt which is the most plentiful uh resource on earth as i understand it and these four jars are the individual elements that make up that basalt which is i think what is most of the earth's crust okay so they do use that mineral but then also in manufacturing here in ransom west virginia and i believe in all their plants they use the cut offs you know the edges of the manufacturing process which we'll see they reintroduce those into the manufacturing process along with any dust from the manufacturing is captured and as it drops out of the air they reintroduce that as well as the melt recycle so the entire process reintegrates all of the materials so it's extremely sustainable and that's how you end up with this product up here that's pretty cool guys stay tuned for the next video in the meantime go follow travis on his catalyst instagram feed and you may or may not be seeing more of him on build show network soon so sign up to the link in our newsletter we actually have 10 new videos a week over on buildshownetwork.com big thanks to rockwool for bringing us out to west virginia super cool plant tour we're super excited to show you what's actually happening out here but i'd highly recommend you check out their insulation products for interior for exterior for below slab travis has got some great videos coming up on some of those in the future but travis i really appreciate you being on this one with me pleasure brother thank you much guys link in the description for everything we talked about today hit that subscribe button we've got new content here every tuesday and every friday follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 138,732

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: lxG3jicp1oU

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022