How to Insulate Your Attic | DIY Renovation

in today's video i'm going to show you how to blow insulation into your attic or your crawl space and how to get a perfect r30 rating even if you can't see what you're doing hey it's jeff and matt here from home renovation diy and today we're here to tell you about how you can save some money if you got an old house like we do then you're going to need to know how to use one of these machines this is the insulation blowing machine we are using the attic cat fiberglass pink system basically the download is this the machine rents for free if you need at least 10 bags but that means you need a thousand square feet of insulation r20 or 500 at our 40 depending on what you're going for each one of these bags does about 100 square feet at r20 level the product itself does not compress over time unless of course it gets wet so make sure you got a good quality roof and basically the concept is simple you can buy the material rent the machine home depot does require a deposit for the machine even if you have good standing for rentals there because it's a separate arrangement 250 bucks just to make sure that this is coming back to the store right and the deal is simple it comes with a hose um and you basically are going to be cutting the bundles in half putting the insulation in here and then inside it's a big steel wheel and it's going to break it all up and then it's going to blow it with the high pressure hose and then this stuff it expands when it gets in the attic you're going to blow it out and it just goes into like some big pink snowflakes we're going to demonstrate the machine in a second and we're going to show you a few things you're going to need to know about attic spaces when you're insulating processes that are effective how to get consistent r value throughout the whole attic and we've got two different areas here we have one that's got a new framing and vapor barrier and not a lot of room to maneuver so we're going to show you how to work in that space and on the other side we've got a much more open situation we're going to be doing a top dressing so we're just going to be adding a little bit more and filling in some cracks and crevices we'll show you all the tips and tricks for getting this done right oh so i'm suggesting that they have a little remote thing here so when you're working you can hit the start or stop button on the machine this is a two-man operation so you're gonna need an assistant because well luck would have it the battery is dead on the remote big surprise it's a rental and i'm gonna have to be yelling at matt to start and stop the machine as i need it uh frustrating anyway you're gonna need an extension cord just a single three prong with the ground okay uh didn't come with the machine thank god i had one and then matt we just have to connect the other part of the hose now this hose is long enough you can actually leave the machine out in your truck and your second person can actually just be loading the machine there's a window here you can tell when it starts to get a little low and with the remote works that works great but since the remote's dead we got to bring the machine up here so we can communicate today which is lovely and it's heavy it's it's a heavy machine all right i remember the last time we did this we didn't read the instructions and it had been so long since i'd done it they're actually listed on the thing it'd been so long we just cut the end off and we tried to push all the insulation that we we had a hell of a time but if you follow the directions it works pretty easy so go ahead and cool so you get your knife uh there's like a dimpled marking here in the middle that you cut in half so you can feed into the machine so i'm just gonna start by cutting the sides deep into it kind of like a stake i guess flip it over cut it again now i don't expect to get all the way through with this so when i'm done cutting i'll just like put my foot on one end pull up on the other and stomp it you should freaking break in half like that split the top here so that when you put it in the machine you can peel back the plastic and it'll go into the machine got a little how to buy but yeah we have to buy maddie yeah and that fits really easy there's lots of room right yeah and so what do you do are you like i'm good to go are you pushing it in and leaving the plastic out right i'm yeah i'm going to be grabbing the top of that so that i made kind of like just leaning into it and pulling okay cool all right so now we got to get up on the ladders me and max are going to get up on the ladders and we're going to demonstrate how to do a top dressing situation what we're going to do is we're going to start off and we're going to shoot this as far as we can try to get the fill all the way to the back of the other side of the room here specifically aiming for the peaks to get it down those rafter joists because you can see behind the insulation there's a huge cavity there's no r value there that'll be the same for every one of those spots so let's do the first half bag we'll try to fill this with that [Music] yeah it usually takes a minute here we go it's starting to chew it up now okay [Music] you can see i'm actually getting about uh about 12 feet of directional control here which is not bad just the one bag for now right yeah we started with the half good we'll stop after that because i gotta crawl in all right we're going to shoot it all the way to the other end of the attic here when you get near the end you just shoot it up into the ceiling and then it'll rain down on your spot because you can't just blow it because it just blows away so you got to rain up as long as you do that kind of a technique when you get near the end everything will be fine get nice even coverage the land is nice and fluffy like it's almost like a pink christmas [Music] and that's how you get a top dressing we just added about about five or six inches everywhere that gets me what's the bag say they're matt six inches is r20 r16 okay seven and a half is our 20. right so in this situation i've already got an r20 insulation laying on top of some older stuff so by adding another 16 i'm pretty good i'm about a 40 here and it fills in all the gaps in between all the other bats and so i finally have a nice layer now let's go show you how to fill up a ceiling cavity with your vapor barrier in place if you don't have one of these at home they're crazy valuable it's an eight foot step ladder that also collapses and becomes a small version of an extension ladder all right it helps you to reach really difficult spaces [Applause] okay pass me my hose okay let's get going i'm aiming at the back wall [Music] being able to see what you're doing is critical you're looking for the total thickness so i got seven and a half inches here i want to go 14 and three quarters so that's up to here okay turn it on i wasn't quite ready for that one we're using all the material matt all of it yeah all right another half nice here i'll just demonstrate up top when i do that it's why it doesn't look like it's filling very fast because it's filling a very large area slowly all right now as you can see we're going to basically just create a mountain of insulation right here because this is actually an exterior wall now so what we're going to do is we're going to put r20 insulation horizontally here and then we're going to use a lawn rake to pull the insulation up tight against it piece of cake we'll put in the insulation staple our plastic halfway across and this will enable us to have enough fill in the space so that we can back it up and fill all this cavity up so we have a nice continual thermal break all right guys there you go who says working on renovations can't be fun this is kind of playing in the playground kind of stuff right it's pretty straightforward it's easy just gotta mind the fact that it is under pressure it's being blown so if you want to fill something and the air that you're blowing is blowing it away just turn it into the roof and let it rain down into the right location it works every time and doing something like this i think the total cost because the rental the four bags i'm in around 300 bucks 350 maybe canadian which isn't bad because i just insulated a huge space and that is going to seal this up tighter than the drum and it's going to conserve all my energy for years and years to come so i would like to know if this is something that after watching it you think you could do it yourself give us a thumbs up if it is and ask your questions in the comments section or let me know if you've had experiences renting the machines on what you thought your experience was so we can encourage other people to tackle this project themselves i'm telling you right now if you go out and hire a contractor for this they're going to charge you thousands or you can do it yourself for just a few hundred bucks and listen if you're insulating things that aren't going to be blown in and you need to know how to use bad insulation and vapor barrier then click the link right here okay don't forget to subscribe to the channel that link is a kitchen video it has all of our tips and tricks for how to do a bad installation successfully you're your best renovator ever so go have some fun and get at it

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 340,113

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, how to do blown-in attic insulation, insulation, home improvement, insulate, attic, thermal insulation, fiberglass insulation, energy efficiency, attic renovation, attic conversion, attic insulation, building insulation, home insulation, home renovation, fiberglass, blown-in, how to install, jeff thorman, saving money heating bill, fibreglass insulation, renting attic equipment, how to insulate your crawlspace

Id: PuEzpNk1OsM

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020