Our house came with a laundry room. It was a really nice space, but it was un-airconditioned and in our garage. As part of a remodel we were able to enclose that space and add heating and air. But it was always colder than the rest of the house. Like 20 degrees colder at times. We ended up blocking it off a lot of the time.
When they enclosed the space they put in the rolled pink fiberglass insulation. It was better than nothing, but we had done the Austin Energy audit about a decade ago and they had blow in insulation over the rest of our house. Last year when it went into the 20s we had our pipes freeze and I got to spend a lot of time thawing them out in the attic in freezing temperatures.
So I wanted to do some weatherization and they said blowing cellulose insulation into your attic is an easy DIY project. I got some extra insulating tape and taped up all the gaps in the insulation around our pipes and then last Saturday we bought 11 bags of cellulose insulation and rented a blower from Home Depot.
They say you need 2 people to lift the blower, and it was really heavy. We got it out of our car easily enough, but had to get Callum to help us when it was time to get it back in. The hoses we got did not have clamps and they suggested we use duct tape to connect them. So we spent a good hour of our 4 hour rental just fighting hoses. I had to go back to home depot and get an o-ring clamp, but once we had the hose secured everything was exactly as trivial as they suggested. It’s a 2 person project. One person is at ground level feeding insulation into the hopper, and the other has a hose in the attic blowing the insulation in. Julie said feeding in the insulation was dusty and tiring. Holding the hose to blow in the insulation was pretty boring and dusty, but otherwise not much work. Even with wasting about 2 hours with hoses and a trip back to Home Depot, we still completed it in time to get our rental back before the 4 hour mark. So this really was a realistic afternoon project – including the trips to the store.
Some questions people have asked me:
1) Do you need special protective equipment? Nope. Cellulose insulation is just like paper and wool. That also makes it carbon negative, since you’re basically storing carbon in your attic. It’s dusty, but the kind of mask you have left over from COVID will work just fine. Any sort of gloves work, and I wore a baseball cap that got really dusty. But I didn’t have any lung or skin irritation. It’s nothing like working with fiberglass insulation.
2) Do you have to remove the old insulation? Nope. This is additive. Your old insulation keeps working and you just add to it. Apparently, insulation is basically measured by the depth so the more you add on top, the better your insulation.
3) Do you have to do any prep? If you have can lighting that isn’t made to be covered in insulation (these are generally the old kind that had halogen bulbs), or soffits there are extra steps to keep them exposed. We did not have those, so mostly I just had to move things around in our attic to get them out of the way. The videos about using the machine explain this stuff pretty thoroughly.
4) How much did it cost? We were doing a 10’x12′ space. I was shooting for something like R60. That’s like 15-20 inches covering the space. That took 11 bags of insulation. With the 4 hour rental it cost less than $400.
5) Are you happy with it? Yes. It used to take your breath away a little bit to walk into those areas. Now it feels like the rest of the house. It used to always be within about 5-10 degrees of our attic. Now it’s generally within 5 degrees of the rest of the house, which is a dramatic difference.