miriam

We just did ours yesterday. We went to a big box store and bought 24 bales of insulation and they let us borrow the blower. There is some way to calculate how much you need. I dumped the bales in the machine and DH installed. We already feel a huge difference. Even if you don't get all of it into the walls it helps a whole lot more than none or very little. Ours had some blown in the walls but not enough and not enough in the attic. It looks like this was made from recycled cardboard and plastics. It was not terribly messy. Temp dipped to teens last night and we were still warm. I think we spent $150 or so on the attic and the machine was free. Blowing the insulation in the attic took about 2 1/2 hours then some clean up time. We've done it before so there wasn't any learning curve. (Allow time for learning.) It isn't rocket science but you need two or 3 people. One or two to load the machine and one to work the hose in the attic - maybe one of the people can yell between the person in the attic and the person loading. I learned to crush the bales a little, cut around the half line of the bales, break them in half, then load broken bits loosely into the machine. It doesn't work to just put the whole bale in the machine. One time we broke up the bales into a garbage can and dumped it into the machine. DH did the hose in the attic part - he started on the farthest part and worked to the hatch. We still could take out the window trim and fill in where they didn't insulate when they replaced the windows but that is a lot more work. At least it is warmer now.

Last weekend DH put some 2 inch thick foam board insulation in part of the crawl space. I cut it to size and put it down the access hole to him and he installed it. He measured it and I just cut it with a utility knife. He mostly wedged it in or nailed it to the back walls. It is toasty warm above where he did that. Then he also used some of the foam to fill in the crawl space vents for the winter. There are places down there we can't really access enough to insulate like it needs. We only used the foam boards under the kitchen and bath. It was about $90 for DIY.