Some ‘cool’ facts on insulation.

Everyone knows that insulating your home is one of the single most useful things you can do to help you start saving energy.

Between lagging your pipes, looking after your loft and filling up your cavity walls, there’s hundreds of pounds – and tonnes of carbon – to be saved.

It’s a familiar old song, and everywhere you look, someone seems to be singing it!

If you think you’ve heard it all before, you’re probably right, but before you completely give up on seeing anything new about insulation, here’s a short collection of odd facts, quick snippets and useful trivia that you just might find interesting.

Odd Performance Facts

There are lots of performance facts bandied about, especially over how much you can save by installing proper insulation in your wall cavities or loft ,but here are a few of the more unusual ones.

• Swedish builders put three layers of insulation in lofts, each 100mm thick and separated by a layer of building paper. It improves the insulation effect by around 60% when the wind blows, since it traps air within the insulation and stops it from being forced out.
• According to some estimates, as much as a quarter of the heat lost through the fabric of a typical house occurs as a result of cold bridging – losses around un-insulated areas such as where the walls meet the floors or roof, and around windows and external doors.
• Around 300mm is the optimum depth for loft insulation; doubling the depth beyond this will not double the energy saving.

Comparing different kinds of insulation and building materials to try to see which one will be best for your needs can sometimes seem a bewildering problem. Here are a few straightforward facts to help you tell your K-values from your U-values – and why they matter!

• A good insulator is a bad conductor of heat; it’s blindingly obvious when you think about it, but it’s worth saying all the same.
• An insulator’s K-value is one of the ways commonly used to measure its “thermal conductivity.” It’s all about how much heat can travel through a piece of insulating material one-metre thick for every one degree C difference between outside and inside temperatures.
• K-value units are W/m.K (Watts per metre per degree)
• U-values are typically used to give an idea of the flow of heat energy through a whole building component – a wall, window or roof – rather than a single type of insulating material. They measure the amount of heat moving through the whole thing for every one square metre of its surface area.
• U-value units are W/m².K (Watts per square metre per degree).
• For both K- and U- values, the lower the number, the better insulation you’ll get.
• A good insulating material should have a K-value no higher than 0.04 W/m.k
• A well-insulated outer wall should have a U-value of less than 0.2 W/m².K and a window 1.0 W/m².K or lower.

Staying Environmentally Friendly

Saving energy’s a great way to help the environment, of course, and fitting good insulation is a very good start – but not all insulating materials are as eco-friendly as others. Here’s our final few facts to help you stay green all the way.

• There’s now a whole range of natural insulation materials available, including cellulose, flax, hemp, straw and sheep wool as well as recycled PET – made from discarded plastic cold drink bottles.
• Some kinds of traditional materials have recycled content; some glass mineral wools are 55% recycled and so is 20% of certain types of rock wools, while recycled PET is 100% recyclable.
• “Blown” cellulose is made from recycled newspaper.
• Studies suggest that natural insulating materials are more durable over time than their traditional counterparts – though you might have to wait for 100 years or so to be absolutely sure!

While recycled PET is not featured here, you can see how other insulating materials fare against the blowtorch…makes for very interesting viewing.

Summer and Insulation?

With our South African Summer just around the corner , most people are thinking air conditioning ,swimming pools and braai’s with friends outside.

Many are not thinking about insulation- and they should be.

Our preconception about insulating in winter to keep warm is equally as valid in summer.

Our air conditioners and air coolers in the house use a lot of electricity to keep the house cool – so why waste it?

Not insulating your home in summer has the same energy loss effect as not insulating in winter.

The cool air that is generated by aircon units is lost through poor insulation in the roof, walls and windows.

Insulation is all about keeping “temperatured” air in and not allowing it to escape so that we have to use more electricity to generate more “temperatured” air.

Like a geyser blanket keeping the hot water in your geyser hot so you don’t was power heating up water that has lost temperature due to inadequate insulation, you should be thinking about your home or business the same way.

Companies all around the world spend a fortune in the summer months running aircon units to keep whole buildings and offices cool in summer.

Many of them don’t have adequate insulation so that their investment ( money spent on electricity to keep their tenants from melting) is wisely used and not simply wasted.

Saving Money with Summer Insulation.

By installing a high quality insulation , companies and homes can save money in summer through maximising the effect of cooled air and keeping it in , instead of letting it leak out.
A basic rule for insulation is “the thicker, the better.”

Basically, the thicker the insulation , the more effective it is at keeping heated or cooled air in the structure, where it should be.

This also increases the efficiency of the cooling units and they work less, meaning less electricity consumption and less money to pay out at the month end.

Using recycled insulation products , like the ones we offer at Think Green Insulation , not only offer you effective insulation all year round, but also make a significant contribution to keeping our environment healthy and free of plastic bottles.

Don’t waste your money this summer.

Think Summer.Think Insulation.

How to do a quick insulation assessment in your home.

Unless your home was specially constructed for energy efficiency, you can probably reduce your energy bills by adding more insulation. Many older homes have less insulation than homes built today, but even adding insulation to a newer home can pay for itself within a few years.

To determine whether you should add insulation, you first need to find out how much insulation you already have in your home and where it is. A qualified home energy auditor will include an insulation check as a routine part of a whole-house energy assessment. An energy assessment, also known as a home energy audit, will also help identify areas of your home that are in need of air sealing. (Before you insulate, you should make sure that your home is properly air sealed.)

If you don’t want an energy assessment, you need to find out the following for yourself:

• Where your home is, isn’t, and/or should be insulated.
• What type of insulation you have.
• The R-value and the thickness or depth (inches) of the insulation you have.

If you live in a newer house, you can probably get this information from the builder. If you live in an older house, you’ll have to inspect the insulation.

Inspecting and evaluating your current insulation.

Check the attic, walls, and floors adjacent to an unheated space, like a garage or basement. The structural elements are usually exposed in these areas, which makes it easy to see what type of insulation you have and to measure its depth or thickness (inches).

Inspect the exterior walls by using an electrical outlet:

1. Turn off the power to the outlet.

2. Remove the outlet cover and shine a flashlight into the crack around the outlet box. You should be able to see if there is insulation in the wall and possibly how thick it is.

3. Pull out a small amount of insulation if needed to help determine the type of insulation.

4. Check outlets on all floors as well as old and new parts of your house. Just because you find insulation in one wall doesn’t mean that it’s everywhere in the house.

Inspect and measure the thickness (inches) of any insulation in unfinished basement ceilings and walls, or above crawlspaces. If the crawlspace isn’t ventilated, it may have insulation in the perimeter wall. If your house is relatively new, it may have insulation outside the basement or foundation walls. If so, the insulation in these spaces won’t be visible. The builder or the original homeowner might be able to tell you if exterior insulation was used.

Why throw your garbage away when you could build a house out of it? Presenting the plastic bottle house..

As a business committed to reducing plastic bottle pollution, Think Green Insulation applauds this innovative concept !

Perhaps this is a solution for the housing crisis in South Africa?

[uvc-youtube id=”nMS8C1fUWqE” width=”560″ height=”315″ autoplay=”0″ controls=”1″]

At Think Green Insulation,we are committed to producing environmentally friendly insulation products made from Recycled PET.

Watch this video on how PET is recycled and see how it goes from a bottle to the insulation we produce.

PET is the plastic commonly used in the production of water and soft drink bottles. It’s a very sophisticated polymer that, after being used as packaging, can be recycled into many new products, from insulation to fibre fill for duvets, and even back into food grade packaging.

Along the way, it helps create thousands of income opportunities, adds to domestic economic growth, reduces our reliance on virgin PET and, most importantly, diverts hundreds of thousands of bottles destined for landfill saving 1.5 tons of carbon for every 1 ton of PET recycled.