#Up house inside how to
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Installers can also spray a thin layer of foam to seal leaks, then fill in with less expensive insulation. Cementitious foam costs about $1.40 to $2 per square foot. Polyicynene and polyurethane are about $1.50 per square foot, including labor, if the wall is open, and $2.25 per square foot for existing walls. Both closed-cell polyurethane and cementitious foam aren’t flexible, so as studs expand and contract, gaps may open. Polyurethane is not stable when exposed to UV rays.

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Polyicynene may crack existing walls or leak out and stain a floor. When you can look beyond initial cost to long-term comfort. Polyicynene gives about R-3.6 per inch of thickness closed-cell polyurethane, between R-6 and R-7 and cementitious foam, R-3.9 Best used Closed-cell polyurethane foams to 30 times its volume and dries to a very hard shell.Ĭementitious foam, which goes on like shaving cream but hardens over days into a meringue consistency, requires mesh across the studs to contain it. On finished walls, installers pour a tamer version through small holes it expands over minutes to 60 times its volume. It’s sprayed between exposed studs and expands to 100 times its volume in mere seconds. Open-cell polyurethane, or polyicynene, is a low-density, spongy foam. Applied only by professionals, it’s more costly than other options but it is the best at plugging air leaks. Made of either open-cell or closed-cell polyurethane (a plastic), or a special cement, this insulation goes on as soft foam or foaming liquid, filling all spaces and then stiffening in place. To understand which material would best suit your renovation, read on. But factoring in site conditions and budget, one kind of insulation will work better or may be easier to install.

#Up house inside how to

“That’s the e-mail I get every day, and there’s no simple answer,” says Andre Desjarlais, director of a program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that focuses on how to build better buildings. So which type of wall insulation is best? Of course, the cost, efficiency (expressed as an R-value that measures resistance to heat transfer), and skill level needed for installation of each type varies. What is the Best Type of Insulation for Interior Walls?Ī homeowner looking to similarly take advantage of a renovation to retrofit new or additional insulation has many choices-plastics, fiberglass, shredded paper, even denim scraps, and wool-in several forms. In the living rooms and some of the bedrooms, Tom chose a slow-pour version of the foam, which goes in through holes drilled into the walls and takes longer to expand, minimizing the threat of cracking the existing plaster. However, finessing the fluffy stuff behind old walls is a lot tougher. Where the walls were open-in the revamped kitchens and bathrooms, for example, and in the attic stud bays that had never been covered-he went with his top insulation choice: polyicynene, a cream-colored liquid polyurethane that foams up and stiffens after pros spray it in place. As is the case with most remodeling projects, many of this house’s walls were going to remain intact, so Tom had to consider how best to retrofit the energy-saving material without gutting the entire building-a job that would have blown the $250,000 renovation budget.

If a house’s attic (or roof) is already fully insulated, adding insulation to the walls may be the single best way to reduce heating and cooling costs. “Or they just don’t realize how much more comfortable their house can be.” Interior Wall Insulation in an Old House “People in houses built before WWII think there’s nothing they can do to protect against the cold,” says Tom. In a region where January temperatures consistently hover below freezing, you really don’t want to be living in a house with no insulation.īut Christine Flynn and Liz Bagley, aunt-and-niece owners of the 1916 two-family house that covered in Season 28 of This Old House, were facing just that-until TOH general contractor Tom Silva came along.