November 2016 - How To Remove Loose Insulation From Your Attic

all right so if you found this video it's because you're trying to figure out how to suck loose insulation out of your attic what I'm going to show you is how I'm doing it so before you comment and tell me I'm doing it wrong don't bother I don't care by the time you watch this I'm already done now if you have suggestions on how to make it easier or better for the next person that comes along and watches the video great more power to you I'd greatly appreciate it I hope I never have to do this again but if I do there's certain things that I will do differently just to make it easier I am replacing the cellulose the blown in cellulose with fiberglass batts I know there's a whole discussion as to what's better loose fill versus batts fiberglass versus cellulose versus spray foam I'm not going to get into that you need to do your own research and figure out what works best for you for me this works best in this house in this application I'm going from roughly an ar-10 ar-15 loose blown and cellulose insulation to what will eventually become a r60 fiberglass bats and it's hopefully going to make a huge difference I've already noticed a small difference in temperature and sound when I go into those rooms that are done I can feel a difference in there's less sound less echo the rooms are also warmer they feel cozier and when I did a temperature check I picked up at least five degrees in just the service temperature of the drywall on the ceiling so great improvement however however it works for you do it figure it out insulation whatever kind you're using definitely works you let's start upstairs we have our standard attic steps here now if your house is like most like mine you can have rooms off of the hallway where the attic steps are I just closed the doors because this loose stuff it gets everywhere now this is not asbestos so I know it's safe but that's something you should consider because some loose insulation the older stuff has asbestos in it so we'll start with what we have here which is really just a couple of pieces of scrap plywood just cover the opening one so I don't fall through but mostly so all that loose stuff doesn't go down below and you just want to make sure the cords aren't covered up too much now I don't have electricity up here I've got to run an extension cord from downstairs to run my lights alright quick tour this is one end of the house and I don't know how well you'll be able to see we have this nice platformed area I've gone ahead taking the screws out of all the platforms that I can get to because all this loose insulation goes underneath and if I block the light you might be able to see the little glimmer of light down there at the end and then over here we've got the tricky part which is a gable end so I've got to crawl through there all right so what you see here is two main gable ends on the left and the right and then a third gable in at 90 degrees on the upper right hand corner of the image here the ad it goes all the way over top of the garage which is far to the left and then the front porches there in the upper left corner and then of course the Attic steps are there on the the right-hand side anyway up here we have a bucket of supplies walkie talkie screwdriver wasp and Hornet spray some spray foam some water a magnet to collect any screws and because I'm terrified of snakes and I found a snake skin some self-defense I've got my work lights this is the loose stuff now when it was originally put up here it was probably to the top of these rafters but if you look it's maybe three inches at most less than that in a lot of places just because it's settled so much we're blown around because it's open to the wind so I'm sucking it out which I started yesterday what I've got here is a extension wand and maybe and let's do this all right so I've got this extension wand with the end on it and all I did was I pre drilled some holes zip-tied a couple of magnets just in case I suck up any screws or nails hopefully it will attach here instead of going through into my vacuum that one and this handle came from Rockler because they have a 4-inch dust vac system that I'm essentially using these little spring clips here attach the hose all the way to the end I'm not going to bother going down there to the end but this hose is flexible hose goes into a hard 90 and I'll go into the garage and show you what it looks like when it comes out but it's a hard 90 degrees so upstairs it's horizontal and then it goes vertical through the attic floor garage ceiling so let's let's go down there and show ya alright so upstairs the hose attaches into this hard 90 degrees this 90 degrees sits on top of this which again is Rockler they've got this system which essentially lets you port through a wall well I'm not running it through a wall so I turned it vertical now what I did was I took some scrap I screwed it to the joist upstairs and downstairs it looks the same and then I pre-drilled around the port end pieces and screwed into the scrap so it is solid as a rock now I've got an adaptor here you and then this is my open and close port so when I'm done I can close it when I'm ready to use it I just open it now that was originally in the Attic too hard to get to so I moved it down here another adapter piece another spring clip in the hose comes out to the dust bag system oh yeah presto change-o here you you alright so today's disclaimer is I am by no means an expert this nice little gate from Rockler apparently is not load-bearing and I don't know if you can see that it's split on me glue came undone probably because it's so cold at 40 degrees so anyway note don't use that in the ceiling good news is they'll still work bad news is a news tool you so we're starting off with a shop-vac dust vac for a workshop actually like a whole house workshop a woodworking shop dust vac set up and if I remember correctly we we got it from Harbor Freight so it's by no means very expensive or very high quality but it works it's very heavy I had to put it together myself all right so we we have the basic motor over there this is the intake here and it has two ports one I just capped off because we only need one hoses hooked up to the other this is a 50-foot flexible hose it's clear which I highly recommend if it's not clear you're not going to be able to see any clogs you're not going to be able to tell if stuff is flowing through if it's not flexible you're going to have a hard time moving it I know some people have used the solid black plastic drains or at the bottom of gutters I don't recommend that this is so much easier to work with so it comes in here comes through here and it does this little cyclone inside the solids come down into a bag and the air comes out of this bag which will inflate like a big hot air balloon to things I don't like about this particular setup one this bag up here at the top all it needs is a little spring clip so that when it deflates this doesn't come off and to when you take this band off see there's a band here so this band keeps the top on this fan keeps the bottom on when you take this band off the band just Falls all the needs is like a little just a little hook here even here on these little posts just to set the band in so you can take the old bag off that's full put the new bag on and the band is right there my dad's been helping me and he stepped on this several times a times hard enough he's actually had to take a hammer and straighten it out because it's just aluminum so or might even be steel I don't know but it's it's it's fragile enough that it will Bend but strong enough it'll stay intact it's just a hassle when you drop it and you get it all over the place not a whole lot to see over here on the other side just a regular outlet this does have a little key so you can take it out so nobody can accidentally turn it on relatively easy to set up it's on wheels on this top part it's a little jiggly these are you know maybe not quite as strong as it could be not quite as sturdy as it could be but generally speaking works great now let me show you how we set it up here give you an idea of how it works alright I'm ready to go yeah the gate in the garage ceiling also broke that little open and closed thing so I just took off and reconnected everything and this is how it works so you can see it's actually not too noisy or too dusty up here but always always for the love of your sinuses and lungs wear a mask of some sort I'm a runner so I'm just wearing my buff and I've worn a balaclava pretty much everything except the traditional dust mask and it works okay the handle that I have here works great the extension wand here works great the last time I used it it was so dry I actually got a really big shock when I went to take the wand off but you now when you slide this wand see that seam over there in the drywall it's a top seam well need to be really careful because if you slide it too hard you're going to hit the seam and bust your drywall and now you have another home-improvement project on your hands and also when you slide it like this when you're pushing just go slow because every now and then there's imperfections in the paper of the drywall which this will catch on which means again more home improvement in your future I guess home repair all right now you see that little twig there he's the wood I've learned as great as a dust vac is that will actually clog either the line this hose or the dust back itself so anything like that paper plastic anything that would get caught up in get caught up in that just need to get rid of you you you you all right just got a good chef static not like I found a rat so that's a set up the next shot here and you'll see how I attempt to get over there in the corner I have the scrap piece of wood with a Northern Tool 98 cent hook on it a couple of screws works great for putting insulation in but also reaching way down there to get stuff loose because this loose fill is packed down so much it's a little bit hard to pump it hard to suck up sometimes you you all right so I've made some good progress I've got all the way up to this one which is all the way up to that one over there maybe see a little bit better this here is going to cause me some issues we'll get to that later and straight runs like this where I've got really nothing to move and lots of height to stand I go really quick from here to here it's roughly one bag one trash bags one two three four four more bags and you know another two three over there two or three over there and I'm down to the fireplace everything on the other side of the fireplace is a garage which well it'll need some extra attention I think we'll get down there when we get down there but for now just keep on trucking and I guess I should say over the garage there's no loose fill it's bad in fiber fiberglass bats but with the facing up which is actually the opposite of what it should be the facing should be towards the living area now granted the garage is not a living area and granted it started out as a carport what does the carport it was never insulated that is all-new and again just installed upside down anyway I've got a by hand go in and take all those out bag them up and trash bags get rid of them but believe it or not those fiberglass bats are worse then this loose fill this loose feels time-consuming it takes two people fiberglass bagging it super super messy it only takes one person so anyway making good progress one thing I don't think I mentioned when your partner downstairs starts it's best to get over here in the eaves to start a bag so they put a new bag on downstairs they start the vacuum up again you want to start over there first because if they turn it off when you're over there it's just a pain in the butt so it's much easier to start over there and then fill up the rest of the bag over here where it's easy so when they stop it's no big deal versus if you go the other way and you start here and you finish the bag over there it's just a panda life anyway back to work you alright so there's a few things that didn't really include in the video first of all the spray foam insulation I first started which is regular minimally expanding spray foam that's for windows and doors ideally you want to use a fire block spray foam and definitely wear latex gloves rubber gloves vinyl gloves that you can just throw away don't use your regular work gloves speaking of work gloves I use two different pair one to remove insulation and one to install insulation both of which I labeled specifically for insulation so that I didn't use them for something else and end up with fiberglass or something else all over me the attic vent I'll go down and show you in just a second the new insulation we put down are 30 everywhere faced batts they were four foot sections and one layer of that everywhere the second layer mostly in the eaves where we don't have this platform to walk on and store stuff on is also our thirty fiberglass unphased and it's 25 foot rolls and that installed very quickly in the eaves it took some extra effort to get it over there so I'll give you a quick tour and show you that kitchen vent and the fireplace down at the end so over here we have the two bathroom exhaust fans and then the stack vent for the two bathrooms for the plumbing sink drains etc that's all new we did that within the last year or two and then you get a good shot here of one layer inside the joist let's try it again you get a good shot here one layer inside the joist and then 90 degrees - that is the second layer so over in the eaves if you can see we have two layers which gives us our 60 same thing over here much much better now this pain-in-the-butt here is actually the microwave exhaust vent this is just a zip tie with some you know screen-door material just to keep any critters from going in and I had a nightmare there to fix up with the drywall now over here might be kind of hard to see but we've got fiberglass and then we've got raxil or mineral wool or rock wool whatever you want to call it around the fireplace abutting the fireplace and then around the other corner where there's just a small gap i used the fire block spray foam and that was based on a recommendation i had read that rock wool or raxil will have a higher ignition point than fiberglass and that's pretty much it it's done for the most part still need to do the decking I think we're going to run here let me get to the other end I think over here we're going to have our storage so we'll have decking over here and then over here we're going to run a single platform down the middle and then double insulate or do two layers the second layer of the r32 give us CR 60 on both both sides what else I put in there it's roughly four foot high roughly 55 feet long and this between the knee wall section is maybe 15 feet or so and that's it so that's it for how to remove loose insulation from your attic a lot of other videos out there most of them very short I hope this one was longer and more in-depth and gave you the detail that you needed feel free to look at any of my other videos wide variety to choose from I don't do a lot of home improvement videos so comment like subscribe all that good stuff and in the meantime I got a I got to go work on a porch so we'll see you next time

Channel: Neil Richard

Views: 140,843

Rating: 4.5186524 out of 5

Keywords: insulation, home improvement, remove, loose, cellulose

Id: CasxSXYR3m4

Length: 34min 31sec (2071 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2016