Hi all,

I am in need of some advice regarding diy wall insulation for my currently uninsulated house. The situation is like this: The house is 80y/o, wooden frame, stucco siding. My main concerns are minimizing wall damage, and minimizing fire-spread risk.

For these reasons, I had wanted to go with blown-in mineral wool, but the olny 2 brands I could find (Rockwool and ThermaFibre) have discontinued their blown insulation. I’ve heard about using perlite for insulation, but it seems that it’s a bad idea for drywall due to how loose the grains are (drill a hole, lose your insulation), and the only advice for binding it is to use concrete, which is probably way too heavy (and permanent) for use inside drywall. I also can’t add insulation externally because of the stucco siding.

I’m really at a loss here. I feel like my requirements aren’t so unusual that there isn’t already some product or technique out there to cover my use case, but I can’t find anything still in production. If anybody has any ideas whatsoever, I’d love to hear them.

UPDATE: I did start looking into the sheeps wool recommendations, HOWEVER, in that time I found scrap mineral wool available from ATS that I’ll be able to use as loose fill. Thanks for trying to help, everyone!

  • Hazzia@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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    7 months ago

    Isn’t urethane foam really flammable though? That’s why I’ve been avoiding it, fiberglass, and organic types of blown insulation.

      • Hazzia@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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        7 months ago

        Okay, my mistake I did forget it was inflammable, but yeah, there are other issues with using it for my house, like rodents using it as a nest, and it disintegrating after a few years, which would require me to open the walls to extract it later. Longevity was another reason I was leaning towards mineral wool and perlite.

        • weariedfae@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Fiberglass insulation is not inflammable (which means the same thing as flammable), it is fire-resistant. But yeah if you’ve got the money mineral wool is really good.

          • Hazzia@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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            7 months ago

            But my problem is that the only mineral wool manufacturers I know of have discontinued their loose fill products, hence the post