What is the best Insulation? (Part 1)

hi jake bruton with aero building in columbia missouri and today we're at our spring valley project and we're going to be having a conversation that i have all the time with clients and that conversation is what is the best insulation and i think after you watch this video you'll understand that that's not an easy answer or that's not an easy question to answer uh but today we're gonna talk to steve riemer of g5 enterprises and uh let's get our conversation started this is gonna be interesting [Music] good mornings hey good morning jake uh okay so you're with g5 enterprises yes sir and g5 for us here in colombia is represented by bolivar insulation correct in other parts of the state it's other things like insul usa is that correct correct okay basically we've got 13 branches uh most of them are based in missouri but we expand into kansas oklahoma um down into arkansas we've got arkansas insulation that is in uh springdale okay rogers uh another one in harrison and we've got locations all over um missouri joplin uh kansas city okay uh and nixa we're our corporate so you guys we cover market yes and you're a fairly decent sized company oh yes uh and you've been in the insulation business for how long i installed my first bat in 1977. okay so a while so steve's been around insulation for a while uh and that's that's actually uh where we'll start in just a second is with bats too it's funny that you said it like that uh we wanted to talk just real quick the idea behind this is what is the best insulation is not an easily answered question the answer to that is it depends it depends on it depends on what you have to accomplish okay absolutely and your budget yep and so we'll talk about both from a budget standpoint and from a utility for like this project because we're here on the spring valley project let's just start with steebrick and building science corporations rule for a net zero house or for the point of uh uh sorry how am i trying to say this the point where things become less a return on investment you know the point where you should stop putting more insulation and then focus on other things right and that rule is 10 20 40 60 and 5 and that's 10 underneath your slab which is what we have here 20 on any foundation walls 40 on any walls above grade 60 in the attic and then windows or doors that are at least an r5 and so here we're 10 under our feet we don't have any below grade walls we have a combination of things that we'll discuss in a minute about what's happening in our wall and this is roughly an r42 we went to an r70 in the attic and we'll talk about why we went above that 60 point and then we're r9 or r7 to r9 glass depending on function of the unit so we're really adhering to that paper from steve brick and that idea that building science corporation puts forward and that's a that's also a product of uh steve basic our architect used to work for building science corporation and now adheres to some of those same philosophies because those philosophies we think are true okay so the the conversation about insulation after we we know what our proportions might might be for something like this uh yes we can talk about code which in our market climate zone four is an r19 uh for walls and uh i believe in r40 r38 you may be 40 here uh and so there's different ways to get to there the code doesn't read put this kind of insulation in the code reads put this much r value in it and so the conversation should start with r value once we have that that beginning out of the way so talk to us a little bit about what r value means and how that applies to the things that we're going to talk about well basically our value is uh the effective way that insulation stops heat flow through it just it's a resistance factor uh is how they name it so basically it's set up in a plexiglass box with a light bulb underneath it and they transfer heat through it and that's how you tell what the r factor is of a product um there are people that are trying to work on a different factor uh to come up with that something that's more real world you might say right uh because just the fact that it stops heat moving through it in a encased box isn't real world uh we've all got air movement outside uh you know air movement inside a wall cavity so that will reduce the r factor we may have soffit eaves that are letting things exactly rush in through our assembly exactly and inside a wall you've got you know air that's cold that's dropping and then it's it's rising on the inside where you're closer to the drywall so when it starts looping like that it will reduce the r factor in products that are fibrous that you can move insulate and move air through so uh but they they're all good products uh it just depends on what you have backing them up and the whole system that they're built into but that's basically what an r factor is is the the effective way that it can resist heat transfer and that's that's literally what the r and r value stands for it's just its ability to resist the movement of heat through it so we have laid out in front of us here and we'll just go through them like one by one uh we're not promoting one thing over the other we'll talk a little pro and con about each one we may talk about environmental impact on some of this stuff but we're just gonna we're gonna pick and choose and we'll just start with the one thing that you mentioned already and that would be bat insulation you said 1978 is that what we said 76 77 okay uh so this this product is a fiberglass bat a lot of it's pink a lot of it is yellow those colors don't mean anything other than marketing right it's the manufacturer yes they're mark uh and so i grew up with the pink panther and with uh owens corning pink and so it's one of those things that when i think fiberglass i think pink i don't think of anything else you can get this faced with a vapor retarder on it and you can get it unfaced you can get fiberglass in anything from a two by four cavity to your attic space and you can get it from r13 all the way to 38 have you ever seen higher than 38 we have installed some of our 49 bats okay so you see there's a wide versatility with this product uh talk to me about grading of insulation steve the the install the install yeah okay uh typically hers raiders in a lot of locations they are required to inspect housing after it's after the installation is done grade one basically is no compressions uh no gaps all your cuts have to be perfect around all of the outlets it's difficult to do with a fiberglass bat but it's possible it takes a lot of additional labor to make sure that you have good cuts that you separate either separate the bat and tuck it behind your wiring or make a cut across it and try and get that back together it just that's one of the products that that it's difficult to get a grade one without spending a lot of labor time which yeah insulation is one of those budget items that people have to build around and so if we spend a lot of labor time uh making it perfect it begins to push it into another another layer of insulation that we can do that is easier to do than make all the cuts in the fibers we might be able to spend more money on a different product and get the same quality of insulation by spending less on labor correct and so the the system for fiberglass is grade one grade two grade three grade one is a perfect install like you were saying everything's cut around cut and fit tightly it's the bat is allowed to decompress and expand because the r value rating that you're getting is not an r value when it's mashed down it's at the full depth of the cavity or the full depth of the intended depth right the product basically what's doing the insulating is the amount of air that this bat can hold the void right so the way it doesn't seem like it's there so if it's compressed there's not much air at my fingers yeah uh when it's like that it can hold a lot of air and that's what does the insulation uh you know when when a guy installs a bat in a wall and he pushes it down the sides and compresses those edges that's what they're talking about compression that they don't want to see that so um you know all the bats have to be completely out a lot of times they face staple that product in so the tabs are outside so that it can have its full compress or its full expansion volume okay so i i was talking to one of the r d guys that owns corning a few years ago at a conference and one of the things that he said to me was you know if you if you think about where you cut around every single box you know there's 30 outlets in that wall and there's 15 switches and if any of them if i can put my thumb in without touching fiberglass i've compromised 12 inches a radius around my thumb of 12 inches so that that to me says while we talk about ease of installation it comes in a bat you can fluff it and stick it in the wall and it's done it also means that it's a complicated product to get right correct or or more complicated than some probably to get right certainly more labor-intensive okay and so this is this is like our first step this is the first installation install installation that i installed as well uh if we go from there the next step up let's go to bat so even though there's a couple other products here let's talk about another version of bat and this happens to be what this is a rock wool or a thermofiber bat that is basically where um your fiberglass bat is sand or melted you know melted sand melted glass that's spun out this is just made out of slag rock a little heavier duty rock it has a higher melting temperature uh so they use this product a lot more so in fire safety uh than they do you know just from a thermal standpoint because it's made of rocks we don't have to worry about it catching fire correct correct well you don't have to worry about fiberglass catching fire either it will melt sooner than this will but uh this is a this is a heavy bat i mean you can tell the difference just in the weight of this you know little over square foot section that we've got here and so he has a lot more when we're still talking about bats i i raised this one up because i wanted to have the the moisture conversation the fire conversation too okay that when we're talking about moisture in the wall we're not talking about bulk water nothing we're going to talk about here is going to perform greatly if you have water running down right inside of your wall right we're talking about incidental moisture that that is small amounts carried by air or occasional seasonal wedding you know due to condensation uh so when we're talking about that and we're talking bats first this guy is not going to be bothered by water or fire because it's made of rocks right this guy is going to be pretty darn resistant to water yes but it's not designed to be underwater like we just said it's not bulk water right uh after we talk about bats we go to a blown in product and let's let's note those and then we'll talk about their ability to control moisture okay so first first we have fiberglass so this is this is the same product as that is this correct this is a yeah this is uh insole safe it's basically this is what they call a virgin wall it doesn't have any binder in it which the binder is what makes this bat stay together uh so you can take this and rub it on it's not gonna hurt on your hands it's not gonna be itchy it's not gonna itch like your standard fiberglass does um this is specifically made for blown in insulation uh you can tell the difference in the fibers of it that it doesn't have any because it almost breaks apart on purpose right right so it it doesn't have the binder that this product is so it's easily blown and so this comes in a bag they dump it in the in in our market right bolivar dumps it into a hopper and a truck and then they run pipe into the house uh like an enormous garden hose right and somebody sprays this either in a netted wall a netted ceiling or an atom just a dynamic correct okay and so its ability to deal with moisture is exactly the same basically as fiber right right it can be blown in the walls and in you know ceilings uh netted ceilings tighter than this to where it will have a greater density than this so it will so that the thumb around the outlet problem is not going to exist with the blown-in product because it can just be blown tighter up against all of the outlets um it you know it is um you're using more product so you are you know naturally you're spending more money on that but it is a a good product like that it's still a fibrous product the air infiltration rate would be less on that than what the fiberglass would so you're beginning to get to a point where you're stopping more air through you know than what you can with a fiberglass bat and air can move pretty freely through this uh it's surprisingly the amount you know we've done demo where there's dirt on the inside of the bat where there's been a you know a split in the bat and air is just traveling through correct and carrying all kinds of stuff yeah if you do many demos you look around the perimeter of those bats and they're dirty they're just brown yeah that's from the dirt that's coming in around it so it's a great filter but yes it is a filter but i like i said it in its correct condition uh it works it does prevent you know does prevent heat flow yeah don't don't take any of the negativity that we might or attach to any of these to be not a recommendation they all have their place so next you can even see the dust come off of that one this is a product called cellulose and it looks to me like that's newspaper is that correct yes it is okay and and so in our market cellulose and blown fiberglass are probably interchangeable we're gonna use them in all the same spots right they are um you know you can use cellulose to dense pack a wall just the same way that you would with this fiberglass loose fill blow it in an attic there is little difference in r factor between them and you know in those attic situations uh you do have to blow more inches of fiberglass and you do a cellulose uh to get up to your r38 or r40 but in an attic you've got you know limited inches i mean you're unlimited inches yeah so you're not constrained by the space of the wall cavity say in an attic so you can just dump as much in as you want correct correct when you start dense packing both of these materials you end up with an r factor that's within two or three of each okay so they're pretty comparable across the board this product being uh they call it cellulose if you remember from like high school science class that the trees are made of plants are made of cellulose and so this in the past has been made from sawdust it's been made from all sorts of things that were always started as a plant they always have been organic they've always started as a plant so my my question is this is recycled content but if this is just recycled newspaper and we use it in our wall and we have a little bit of incidental moisture like we're just talking about why doesn't this just turn to mold why doesn't it just rot it it has chemical in it so it won't um but it it also once it gets wet and though and the air the air holding capacity changes i don't want to say paper mache i did say paper mache you kind of you kind of end up with that yeah you know it it fills in those air holes when you when you take wet newspaper and compress it yep uh it doesn't have as much capacity to hold air anymore and do the insulating that you need it to do okay because it's not wallets while it's recycled content they're also stuffing it full of chemicals and borate specifically right to keep it from molding or mildewing which it's inert once it's in the wall and you're not touching it and you're not consuming it it's not going to bother you at all right you know most of these have some downside for the stuff that they have absolutely we all want to believe that our walls are going to be dry and that we have you know little moisture that goes through them it's not cellulose's fault that we get moisture inside a wall that's what we've done to control the moisture up to it but if that happens then it becomes a material that's really difficult to deal with yeah you know they have to get that out and they can blow that wet and they can blow that dry what's what's the benefit of blowing it wet benefit of blowing it wet is you don't have to put up a net uh okay so i can come in you can come to that in place right there um you know so it it will stick in place until you hang your drywall uh one key factor that you need to pay close attention to is that you make sure that that material dries down to um a certain percentage before you start covering it up okay so we're monitoring it yeah you getting uncovered for two to three days okay uh you know to make sure that you're that the moisture content is low enough to cover it up and and lock it in the wall so then from a production builder standpoint maybe the thing to do is net and blow it dry that way you can have crackers the next day hanging things right uh and that's one of those i'm always thinking about what does the production schedule look like so after we talk about bats and we talk about blown in oh by the way you can also get uh mineral rule or rockwool in a blown form we just don't have anybody or yeah a blown in place right uh it's a little more difficult on the machines it's it wears them on the person that's yeah blowing it yeah but again you get the benefits of those two blown in place products in mixed with it's rocks it's not going to catch on fire no moisture is going to bother it it's a little harder to come by so we don't have any of it here so after we talk about bats and blown in we start talking about uh cheat goods and there are multiple different kinds i would say that also there is a a mineral wool product that comes in large sheets that you see a lot for exterior application that we don't have here as well and again it's rocks so it's right to be bothered for being outside so we have three different kinds of uh board insulation here we have poly iso xps and eps run me through a little bit of what what the difference in these products is um basically it's the chemical makeup of them uh you know poly iso uh would have the highest r factor of these uh it needs to have this product in place on it the sheathing on each side of the skin on it so it doesn't start to you know decompose but this is a you know it's a great product uh typically used above grade you can't get moisture inside that um [Music] it starts to lose our value and integrity when you can get it below you get it below grade and yeah and when you get it wet so now i mean there are people that are using this product um below grade inside ohms you know on the inside of the elevation walls and it's a good product for that but it does have a good high r factor um and this is like a r six and a half per inch correct so this is like an r13 and two inches here right and then the xps xps is just extruded polystyrene uh these two are closer in families together um this has an r5 yup per inch used typically it has a lot more compressive strength than what this product does so from a you know putting it on the exterior of a foundation and then back filling against it it will withstand that where this product wouldn't do that uh this is so this is approved for below grade correct okay correct um basically your uh expanded um is basically what you consider for your coolers or coffee cup uh call it beadboard yeah it's just you know it's a lot of little beads of expanded polystyrene there um less r factor uh not as um not as conducive to you know compressive strength on it it will you know it will dent uh so not like this product but it's a you know as far as exterior use below grade um i don't see many guys use it on the exteriors they put it under slabs like that and so when you talk about all three of these products these are all petroleum-based they're all in that family uh it's my understanding that the poly iso is probably considered the most eco-friendly from a blowing agent standpoint so in their manufacturing process they aerate the product they shove air into it just like we were talking about with the other things but they do that by introducing a blowing agent in the manufacturing process and while these two are on their way to being way more eco-friendly in the united states they're not yet and the the poly polyiso is probably the best from an environmental impacts we've used the eps and the eps is an interesting conversation because you say it dimples but at the same time we can order different kinds of eps that have different compaction densities yeah so this is actually a type 9 it's a 20 psi which you know if you extrapolate that out that's more weight than any house is going to have on it per square foot the interesting thing about this the the type 9 specifically it's what they put under heated runways and if you've ever seen them building up on ramps to build a ramp across the highway that's what they bet they use as backfill because they can get a lot of space with high compression quickly cover it with dirt they know this isn't going to biodegrade being underground and they they're able to really use this in a lot of interesting ways that when i cut it and it comes apart like a broken up coffee cup that i used to play with at the baseball field or the softball field when my sister played softball it's weird to think that that that move has gone that far so these sheet goods mostly in our market you're going to see them inside there is some some ability to do exterior foam uh and we'll talk about exterior at the very end we'll talk here about what we have here uh and so after we talk about these we're on to spray foams right and so again there's in our environmental conversation that everything on this half of the table is probably not as good for the environment just from a manufacturing standpoint uh there's an argument to be made one way or the other in the long term of well if this house uses a lot less energy maybe that's better for the environment if we have you know so we could go back and forth on that but when we're talking about spray foam the interesting thing that's about that i think is really interesting about spray foam this is a product that's manufactured here not here in the state of missouri i mean here manufactured on-site it's manufactured on-site the rest of these are all taken care of and shipped to us and all we have to do is install them properly these come in chemical form and we have to mix it and put it on the wall now the gun sprays it out right do you want to talk to us about the process for spray foam sure i'm going to cut in right here and say that the conversation with uh our insulator was so good and the content was so great this video is actually only about halfway over so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna just pick a point and splice here and uh next week will be part two so thanks for watching stay tuned for next week for part two

Channel: Aarow Building

Views: 79,835

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Id: qWbf-BDTXqU

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021