DIY Loft/Attic Insulation with over-boarding for Storage [Superhome59 Video part 10]

come to a super home 59 video about not insulation and today I'm going to chair this is are not hatch now the first thing that strikes you about our loft hatch is the very thick watch wage of polystyrene is polystyrene but is on the back of the door the door itself is a hard plastic and around the edge if you look very closely the seal that seals operate closely against the rim of the door itself of the actual hatch in the ceiling now that will seal completely like that and that's a tremendous improvement from where we were three years ago the original loft hatch for a house in 1980s would have been about a three or four millimeter piece of ply board and it wouldn't fit around the edges at all but you could have seen daylight through it that's how bad it was now keeping in mind the various home improvements have made to the loft insulation including the boarding and storage as you see in a minute we actually have further blessed be easy access to the loft I only put on ladder and extend it to the floor access so here we are in the Attic you can see it's for a dunk like many homes attics are full of junk but this one's a little bit special I should point your attention now to the hatch area where I'm standing and you can see the exposed insulation here and I can touch this quite freely because there's a sheep's wool insulation now that level where my hand is is the original ceiling joists okay so that's the load-bearing structure of the house okay so above it you see a secondary joist here okay now that's running at right angles to the original load-bearing joists it is not load-bearing other than that it's holding up this floor inside the Attic okay some top of that you see other one we laid it crisscross like this running across the joists in 90 degrees and another layer across the new choice and 90 degrees as well so that gave us a lattice now of course you just can't lay pieces of wood across your attic expects to be base stable of course it has we flawed on top of it it will just fall over so everything has to be bolted down so how do we do that when the say Department of wicks we bought roofing brackets they are steel like this most of you cheap to buy were bought a bucket full of them and what they do is when you fix the first layer of wood like here across the joisting you basically fixed the two to go like that drill two holes in there two holes in there drew unscrew some screws into there just for information according to the information sheet on this this is a forty seven millimeter x 100 millimeter joist it is 2.4 meters long of course with the secondary where it's been secured is to the a-frame this is the a-frame in the Attic of most non flat roofs like this and here's not a frame behind me and look closely here there's another fixing bracket it's much like these of things but it's not l-shaped it's just basically long and flat and so we have a lined up the over joisting with the a-frame and basically put three holes and three screws there three holes and three screws along there that makes it's very rigid it's very much attached to the a-frame and little joists in the Attic so whilst we were fixing the new joists we laid the insulation between the joists it comes as most of this some rolled insulation is a big role in plastic bags we simply lay the joists secured them the brackets and then rolled out the insulation between them we did the first layer of the sandwich and then we applied the new joisting on top of that and employed the second layer the original layer of insulation we look very closely actually is still there and that's mineral wool insulation that's a stuff that often makes your skin itch the yellow stuff so what we have now are two layers and these are meant to be about a hundred millimeter thick layers of the insulation two layers that on top of mineral water so that's three hundred millimeters of insulation in total okay you can see also recline over boarding should give us a good solid load bearing top flat top for us to do perform storage on and we have lots of storage on there now I make this insulation sound relatively simple in fact it took three months to do this job this space here is a 5 meter x 8 meter space ok so we have here what 40 square meters and of course we did everything twice because there's two layers insulation even more complicated than that we also had to seal in the lights in the ceiling above there are inset lights here and this box here just about see it is unboxing in in the attic space those inset lights in the ceiling basically it makes it airtight because all what's happening was all the hot air from downstairs was escaping into the Attic around the light fittings there was nothing to seal them in so we did basic DIY again went to a local retailer and building merchants bought these sections of wood chopped them up and then applied them with basic PVA wood glue and managed to seal them with a basic pieces of them this is going to furniture board on top with a small slot cut for the wiring this raises it above the level of the joist and above the level of the rear the electronics of the lighting system so it's all self-contained inside there and this is a screw down so we want to maintain the lights change the wiring we can just lift this top off here and it can all be changed all the flooring here is just screwed down so everything can be lifted up for maintenance purposes part thing to mention here is pipe work all the pipe work here has been thoroughly insulated when we moved in in 2008 there was no pipe insulation anywhere in the attic this one a pipe from my hand is on now goes basically from the shower pumps behind me all the way down to a bedroom as over the garage to a bathroom that's in that area to pump the water down there okay so it's of a long run of pipe of no insulation whatsoever now I have a funny story about it for the insulation when we first came here I've heard of insulation and the piping behind me just snapped in half it was plastic it actually been applied of plastic push-fit fittings and someone at some point to fitted them onto copper piping and then they'd used a blowtorch on the piping it's made the piping very hot this made the plastic very weak so since I didn't maintenance it is snapped there was water everywhere it was a near disaster I don't look forward to telling you the story again it was not enjoyable I had to call an emergency plumber and an enormous expense we managed to isolate the water switch it off we managed to save the Attic see the Attic of the ceiling Lo and because thankfully those plastic boxes in the attic and I'm actually catch the water was leaking in a plastic box long enough the emergency plumber plumber to come out and rescue us it was not a happy sight thankfully we drive the Attic out we had to get rid of some of the insulation that was soaked and we're going to replace most of it anyway so that's fine so be aware in old houses with DIY plumbing that you don't break it we have now successfully replaced all the plumbing and if you look just behind me here we have quite solid flexi piping now fitted and that is bulletproof I could probably kick it it wouldn't break that's what we have here is the hot-water tank was just ahead of tank for the arm the water that we use for washing and showers and baths okay there would have been a head of tank here for the heating system but that's now gone because actually we have a pressurized system and that specialized via these valves that you see behind me here relatively maintenance free and really have to do anything with that as you can see tank he was well insulated when we write him 2008 there was no installation on this tank whatsoever it wasn't even a lid and there was stuff floating it wasn't very nice so we put a lid on we insert it away around that could be quite important when you will insulate a loft space like this it's going to be more exposed to the ambient temperature outside the house if it's freezing out there it could be freezing in here some of the things you have to do as recommendation as you don't put too much insulation down here and I'll show you what I mean so down here move that suspense elation is actually much less insulation down here so a little bit of heat will trickle up here to try and stop the water pipes from freezing another important thing I'm going to any worker an attic is to make sure you fit some lighting this is not the writing of the Attic in fact this attic had no original lighting system I had to install all this myself if you're not confident that sort of work then do get an electrician to fit it it's relatively simple to do yourself I just use an extension cable around the Attic and actually run that cable through a hole in the ceiling down into we're messing what Hogwarts under is in the airing cupboard and I plug it into a main socket down there relatively simple DIY task to do there's one two three four light bulbs in here more than enough for an average-sized attic but good light is very important when we came here in 2008 the only thing I found here was a basic lamp that was stood right here and nothing in it no light bulb it was actually a while later I found a light bulb had exploded I was lying a purple glass all over top of insulation it was a bit of a nightmare one aspect worth pointing out to you is the fact that we have labeled on top of the flooring itself the location of all the wiring and all of the light fittings including down to where the screws are okay and they're all written up that's exactly what they are so anytime maintenance is required and electricians can come up here and they can have a look around like see exactly how everything is laid out that includes any piping I don't think there is much piping here other than down to domestic hot water cylinder but even that's labeled off this has been a super home 59 video all about attic insulation loft installation and so DIY task is get done up there an old 1980s house my name's mark brown you can come and visit this house any time of your life just go to WWE Homes org dot UK forward slash fifty nine and we look forward to meeting you and you too can conquer your house

Channel: Low Energy Retrofit South Bucks - Superhome 59

Views: 705,813

Keywords: superhome, retrofit, low, carbon, energy, efficient, house, home, loft, attic, sheep, wool, insulation, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Building Insulation (Industry), Global, Warming, Change, Solar, Green, eco, Climate, storage, boarding, joists, hatch

Id: Zj778ibGV2U

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 17 2014