Insulation takes time

This is the continuation of a story that started a couple of days ago.

Now… here's where the story gets interesting. The manufacturer's specifications were printed on the bags of cellulous (would it be more fun if it was made of cellulite – ridding the world of bumpy hips one wall at a time!). The specs said that one bag covered 39 square feet of wall.

Allowing for 2" every 16" and putting the main floor at 8.5" and the second floor at 7.5". Then measure the linear footage of each floor – skipping windows and doors all together. Then adjusting for the width of a 2x4 every 16" you lose 2 feet for every 8 feet of space and the fact that the space is a full 4" deep and not the 3.5" that the manufacturer expected… whew. The math said that we would need more than 30 bags.

After just about a full day of blowing they had only gone through 13 bags. When they were almost done the house they only needed another two or three to 'finish' the job.

The math just didn't work out. And for those of you who know me… the math has to make sense or I lose sleep… it's just the way I was made.

I opened up the wall where the shower is going in the SCR (keep in mind that this building has two extra boards on either side of the structural 2x4) and poked a stiff wire into the spaces between the 1" barn boards (most people would have had an incredible mess on their hands since the drywall would be the only thing holding all of this loose blown in cellulite into the wall).

The wire showed that the machine was only able to blow the stuff about half way up the cavity. That would make the 15 bags make sense. It also seems to make sense that the machine would have to be operating at top efficiency to blow insulation 4 feet up the wall using only a ½" tube – that's a LOT of insulation to blow straight up and expect it to stick while the space is being filled through a ½" hole.

The next day a new team of insulators came back with the same machine that they had spent the morning working on - they figured they had fixed the blower issue. We were able to test the machine since two of the spaces had been missed behind the shower the previous day (don't ask – you don't want to know).

The machine was still only firing about half way up. Fortunately while I was lying awake the previousIn night trying to make the math work I figured out what to do if this very thing happened!

<<to be continued>>