Spray foam insulation

[Russ Wolfe]

Most stucco should have been applied with 30# tar paper felt under it.
_________________
Society is like stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you end up with a lot of scum on the top!--Edward Abbey

Gary: OK. Ima poop.

[skills@eurocarsplus]

[wgargan]

[Iowa Mark]

[Russ Wolfe]

You do not say where you ar located. Different parts of the country have to use different techniques to insulate.
Vapor barrier is one of them.
It should go under the sheet rock. There is a lot of moisture in a house.
When we get cold weather here, me actually get ice on the inside of the windows when it is below 0F.
If I did not have 6mil vapor barrier under the sheet rock, that moisture would be going into the insulation, trying to get to the cold outside shell of the house.
_________________
Society is like stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you end up with a lot of scum on the top!--Edward Abbey

Gary: OK. Ima poop.

[millerje78]

[millerje78]

[Jimmy111]

I used to make walk in coolers and freezers.
Spray foam and pour foam are great. They used to use R-11 freon but because it suposably destroyed the ozone layer it was abandoned. Now they mainly use R-134 and other non flamable freons. For comercial applications pentane is used and it is flamable. But is never used in any foam that is not used in a factory setting.
The best thing about it is that it almost completly stops air infiltration. I did my house 2 years ago and my heating bill dropped from about $275 per month to under $100. The spray foam you cant do yourself unless you want to spend $30,000 on a proportioning sprayer.
I ripped all my drywall off and had someone spray the foam then re drywalled it. It cost about 1.25 per sq ft for 3-1/2 inches of foam.

[Major Woody]

A house with a standard stucco hard-coat system on the outside should have, in the following order from the inside out:
1. drywall or plaster wall finish
2. framing with insulation (or lack thereof)
3. sheathing
4. felt tarpaper, jumbotex, tyvek or some other weather resistant barrier (some of it looks like kraft paper on the backside but has a thin tar-like coating facing out. It sucks but does repel moisture.
5. Metal lath, stapled into the sheathing
6. Hard-coat, cementious Stucco. I assume the house is not EIFS (synthetic stucco). Those systems are different. If it is an old house, it would not be EIFS.

The windows and doors should have metal sill pans and head flashing. Sometimes this is missing and lets water in.
The problem could also simply be mosture from the warm interior of the house condensing on the cold back surface of the building wrap.

You really need to figure out what is causing this moisture issue, as insulation will prevent air movement in the stud bay and trap whatever moisture is getting in, causing rot.

[dcketh]

[cdennisg]

[dcketh]

cdennisg,

My post was not meant to be condescending, but I can see now that it may have seemed as if it was. Sorry. I just wanted to point out that vermiculite and asbestos are two different things and not necessarily associated with each other. However, after I posted I read some more about it, and apparently something like 80% of all the vermiculite produced prior to 1990 came from Libby. So, perhaps your statement is more accurate to say that, in general, it IS contaminated! In any case, the only way to know for certain if your house has asbestos is to test for it. In my case, the vermiculite I have is not attic insulation per se, but rather finer white granules that I suspect is what the builder (or more likely the previous owner) mixed with plaster to make ceiling texture. It seems he must have had a bunch left over and decided he might as well use it for something and spread it around in the attic. I need to blow cellulose up there and insulate it right and wanted to know what the hell that stuff was before I do so, or hire someone else to do so.
_________________
~ Dan ~
'71 Westy
'74 Thing

[Major Woody]

I had the walls and attic of our 1953 house insulated to code with cellulose. I priced it both ways and it was barely more expensive to have the work done professionally vs doing it myself. Attic was coated with about an inch of rock wool mixed with vermiculite. It is good to have that covered up with two feet of cellulose.

[cdennisg]