Insulated the attic space above my garage ... er ... shop. Used the "incredibly fast, incredibly easy, low dust" blown-in stuff from BBB, (Big Blue Box, i.e., Lowes).
My comments:
[1] It ain't fast.
The machine they give you to blow the stuff is about the worst piece of engineering I've ever enountered. It basically has three parts: a big square hopper, a mixer-like thingie which breaks up the insulation from the brick-like form into which it is pressed at the manufacturer, and a blower to send the stuff up a hose into the attic, (or wherever).
The hopper does nothing, which is as it should be. So far, so good.
The beater works on a chain drive which is connected to a nice, hefty Leeson gear motor. Dwarfs the 1.5 HP TEFC motor on my Delta DC.
Okey-dokey, we're doing fine, right?
NOT QUITE
The blower, unfortunately, is a little vaccuum cleaner motor.
Yep.
A vaccuum cleaner motor. Feeding into 75' of 2.5" hose. When it wasn't clogging, it managed to gasp just hard enough to go through 4 bags of insulation in a little less than an hour.(The manufacturer claims 20!)
After about 2 hours, during which we, (my nephew and I), managed to pump a meager 6 bags of this crud into the boiling hot attic I got smart and returned the pathetic machine to Lowes. Then I made a quick hopper out of some spare plywood and attached it and a 50' length of 4" flexible drain tubing to my aforementioned 1.5 HP Delta DC and off to the races we went!
That puppy spewed that stuff faster than we could feed it!
[2] It ain't easy
Whoever wrote the specs apparently never tried to use the thing in an actual enclosed space.
Just put little strips of tape along the rafters to show how deep to go.
Great idea, until the stuff starts pumping and the whole world turns black like the inside of a tornado.
[3] Low dust???????????? My grandchildren's grandchildren will probably be born caughing up that stuff!
Oh well, it's done now, and I've got a lovely covering of somewhere betwen R25 and R50 or so, depending on which part of the attic one were to measure.(See numbers 2 & 3 for explanation.)
I also have anywhere from about a half inch to six inches of the stuff all over the shop -- still waiting to be cleaned up.
So, who else had fun this weekend?
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