7 reasons I used Rockwool insulation at my house.

Hello guys, welcome back to my

house

under construction. This is what I have been calling the real reconstruction project. I'm at a critical stage right now. I'm in the installation phase and my drywall will actually arrive in two days. start hanging the rock on the walls so this is the perfect time to give you a tour of my

insulation

show you what products specifically I

used

and why I use them there and in this video I'll give you seven

reasons

why I chose. rock wool for most of the

insulation

in my

house

minus two minor areas where I did a different type of insulation.

Today's video is sponsored by rock wool, let's start off right guys, so first let's talk about the type of insulation that I

used

as I mentioned. before, this is rock wool bats now, if you're not familiar with rock wool, Rockwell is a mineral wool insulation. If you look at their commercials, they basically say look, this is made of rocks and the beauty of rocks is that rock is a very durable material and it also has, because it's made of rocks, a certain natural tendency toward fire resistance. , so for example if you take a standard household lighter and try to light it you will notice that it will not burn if you do this to a lot of other materials you will light them and this one will not burn as cold so the fire resistance is One of the main

reasons

I like rock wool, but one of the things I also like is that it is relatively easy to install now that my house was framed on the outside on 16 inches on centers, which means that these bats here are a friction fit bat, now this is unlined and I like unlined bats because then I can deal with the vapor and the air separately, but it also means you have to keep an eye on these details. so here I have an electrical outlet or sorry, I have a low voltage outlet down here that will be a cat6 cable for ethernet.

The insulators did a great job on this cutting the bat so we got full. deep insulation in that cavity instead of stuffing it and having a wire in there now when you're working with it you don't need a lot of PPE either which is nice, you'll normally wear long sleeves and gloves now. I'm not installing, I'm just playing with it, so I just have gloves on and you're going to wear a dust mask. You don't even need a full respirator, really just a dust mask compared to many products. like if you think about the guys that use spray foam in a house, you have a giant platform, you have hoses, you have respirators, you have gases to deal with all those other things with this, open the bag here, take out the bats and Now we're going to fit by friction at each location.

One thing I really like about Rockwell 2 is they tell you the actual bat right there so this is an r15 bat and this is an outside wall now if you scroll over here and look at this one it has the rock wool logo there , but it's worthless, this is your inner product, it's called safe and sound, it's a sound-deadening bat and that's really the second thing, besides fire, that I really like about rock wool is that it's a dead product with a lot of sound, we'll do a test a little later in the video, we'll show you how much sound control this will give your house, but if you stay here and I'll be silent. for a second, incredibly dead air in this space, I don't know if we can get the room tone in the sound, but it's super super dead in here and I actually have some guys working downstairs, you can't hear them at all and often, shout up above while this rock wall is in place hey, what do you want for lunch or come down?

I have an appointment here and you have to physically go up the stairs to do it now the sound will change a little bit once the drywall turns into the drywall will bounce off that noise a little bit but this absolutely absorbs it. I actually built my studio with this and covered it with fabric to give us that noise reduction. The next thing I really like about this is it's very easy to install yourself if you want to do the installation yourself now there's really only one main piece of equipment you're going to have to cut these bats and they recommend using a bread knife.

The professional insulators I used, I used mountain insulation. Here in Austin, Texas, they did a fantastic job. Your guys have a knife that they sharpen every day or probably even more than once a day. It's basically a long bread knife, although a serrated bread knife would be best and they are very used to working. with it, it makes it super easy, they're cutting those bats, they're cutting and fitting the guys that did the roof here, they had stilts and man they just installed the roof super fast, once you get it right it actually flies. the installation is very fast.

The next thing I really like about rock wool is that it's open to steam, which means there might be some drying that could dry out there by having these bats here. In fact, you could dry these bats out if there was some incidental amount of moisture on the outside of the house, that's a big problem for northern builders who really want to make sure it dries in both directions through their insulation. They don't want a vapor barrier in the wrong place. I want to mention about rock wool which I really like is that it is very easy to remodel now a couple of years ago I went to help after hurricane harvey in houston and one of the houses that I cleaned was a house that had spray foam open cell and that area of ​​the sheetrock that was damaged and where the flood waters were was an absolute disaster to get out not only the sheetrock, in fact the sheetrock came off pretty easily, but to get it out all that spraying, you basically had to dig it all up. and because it was open cell foam, it had absorbed all that moisture and was like a big wet nasty sponge taking it out now, on the other hand, one of the things I like about rock wool is that it's hydrophobic, which means if we took bottled water and drip some water on this bat right here the water would run off like water off a duck's back, it's not going to absorb that water, okay, now we talk about seven advantages, let's mention three things which could be perceived as a scam, the first one I get all the time, it doesn't itch as much, you know, it doesn't itch any more than any other product on the market, wear gloves, wear long sleeves and it's really no big deal, and the Another thing I like is the fibers of this which are very heavy and dense, so when I walk in a house like this that has been insulated, there are no particles in the air, in fact, if you look at the sun rays that come in through the windows, no I don't see particles in the air and I feel like some of the other I don't want to say their names, but some of the other insulations that are on the market have some particles that are as light as air floats, so For example, if I go into a standard attic that has been insulated into the floor with some type of blown-in material, it is absolutely mandatory that I put on a dust mask because with my dust allergy it almost kicks in immediately.

On the other hand, when I go into that space, I've been in my house here under construction for a full week and a half with this rock wool and I haven't had any problems now, I'm not installing it like before. I said I should wear a dust mask if I'm installing it but in this case I haven't had any problems with my dust allergy as it is a very heavy particle and therefore falls to the ground quickly compared to particulate matter. floating, another disadvantage. I had to think for this house that this won't stick anywhere, meaning this friction fit bat will work great and stay in place, but will ultimately rely on the sheetrock to keep it in place. in the other one. hand in my attic where I used rock wool right on my rafters.

I had to do a really good job securing it in place. I used some strips of fabric and I also used some tiger paws which are basically a metal clamp to hold that in place. but I had to think about how it would hold up in the joist areas of my house as well, which are the areas where I have insulation in the floor joists, where the floor joists come out and stop at the walls, that would be an area that would hold up. spray foam would work because it will stick there but now you need to hold down the bad insulation, that seems like a disadvantage but I actually think it's a benefit that it doesn't stick because I think I want that.

Kindness of the remodeling. You know, I'm thinking of this house as one that could be passed down to a future generation. You know, I could have grandchildren living in this house one day if they remodel it. I wish they could take that isolation. Do whatever they need to do, change the wiring, do whatever and put it back. If I were to use spray foam in that location, it would have been fixed in place on that band beam. The other drawback I want to mention is that there is no air seal. benefit to this material, so we can't put it in an area that leaks, which means if you had an outlet in this exterior wall and that outlet wasn't sealed, it could cause air to flow through this insulation, that It is something you must maintain.

Keep this in mind when you are building the house and in my opinion the most important thing to do is to do a good job of air sealing before insulation and not rely on spray foam or other insulation for air support. seal when actually the insulation should just retain that heat or that cold and it shouldn't necessarily be for air purposes, now I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth because right under my feet on the roof of my garage, which is underneath To my deck here I use closed cell foam against the bottom. The reason I did it was that I wanted a little bit of that added benefit of air sealing between the house and the garage and I also wanted to make sure my insulation was working.

I have to stick to the bottom of my subfloor, so ultimately my entire house is about 90 percent plus 95 percent rock wool, but I have a little bit of closed cell at my feet here, where the ceiling of my garage has been insulated with three inches of closed cell foam and there is another place in my house which is my pop up staircase where it was only about four inches total depth and I wanted to be able to get the highest r value out of them so I insulated it with closed foam. cell phone but in the end I am very happy that I did rock wool everywhere and you are going to notice that basically all the interior walls of my house have rock wool on these walls you will see the r value and on these walls I will see their logo which means which are your bats safe and sound and that's going to be the last thing I want to mention here today is how to bid on this project.

If you have insulation coming your way, definitely order rock wool, the fantastic product I mentioned. I think these seven benefits really set it apart from the competition, but it is sometimes more expensive than standard insulations, so don't substitute them, you actually want to ask for rock wool by name, and lastly, consider insulating all of your walls. interiors. and potentially most or all of the ceilings where you have connected spaces in my bedrooms in my family room in the rooms that separate my bedroom my master bedroom let's say from my living room all of that made perfect sense to me to make the bats safe and sound, and These bats are a little less expensive as safe and sound than true insulating bats on the outside of the house, so for a little more extra money, a lot of benefits in sound.

Hey guys, another thing I like about rock wool is that I like that you can write on it, let's say if I was hanging a TV on this wall and I needed to take a measurement, I could use a marker here or Milwaukee markers , which actually Use it all the time and check it out. You can draw on that isolation. It holds up very well, which means it also takes paint very well and this is incredibly useful for a builder. Look at this. This wall here really did it. I don't make this brand, but I need to make this.

This wall here is getting sheet rock and not quiet rock, so I marked a bunch of my walls sr or qr and look, that rock wool looks perfect with that orange spray paint and it takes very, very well. well, and that's a benefit for me as a builder, good job, the rock wool looks more like a butt than a heart, it's not a very good heart drawer, is it? Before I close the video, let me grab my sound level meter and I'll actually take a look. if we can test what that sound benefit is, okay guys, little rock wool sound test, uh, if you just look at my voice when I speak, even though I speak loudly, I'm probably in my 50s or 60s by the way I sound, for my voice in this. sound meter, so when we turn the outlet back on, let's see what our sound meter reads here, so it's about 75 decibels when we're a foot or two away from there, now let's go upstairs and we're going to go to my bedroom. my daughter, who is literally right on top of the vacuum cleaner, if you can look back to see where thevacuum, we're going to go directly above that room and remember we don't have any drywall installed, we don't have any interior. doors in place, okay, so I'm still in the line of sight of the draft vacuum, but you know, I'm 15 feet or more away, let's call it 58 decibels, now let's go upstairs and we'll hang it right on my My daughter's bedroom is now directly below us.

Remember there are no doors. I have rock wool safe and sound in the beam of my eye. I have some sound bats on your walls. Let's see what the meter says. Can you hear it? I can't hear anything even with my good ears, I can barely pick up the vacuum cleaners running downstairs and the sound level meter cuts off at 40 decibels, so it goes from 70-ish 68-70-ish to less than 40 on the sound level meter Drop of 30 decibels without doors installed, that's what I was talking about sound attenuation, amazing product. Alright guys, that's it for today's construction program.

I hope you learned something about rock wool that you didn't learn before. These guys have been program sponsors for me for a long time, but one of the things that I like about these guys is that they have given me the freedom to use other types of insulation where I thought it was best in the project and in this house I could have used whatever I wanted wherever I wanted, but I chose rock wool like you saw for about 95 of my house and I am so grateful I did. This is a really good product. I highly recommend it for your home.

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