My house is the first house I designed and therefore comes under the 'allowable mistakes' section I guess. I mistake is only a problem if is not assimilated into future practice, and of course remedied.
One of the biggest was not sealing the strawbale wall top adequately, combined with the curved and therefore gappy nature of the surfeit it resulted in way too mch air movement through the rafter cavity. The roof is insulated on the exterior of the waterproof membrane so the dew point can not be inside but with the rafter cavity running some brisk natural air-con the insulation never really got to do its job.
So, the problem sat in my draft addled head for many years. How best to inject insulation with the least amount of work and maximum impact.
I found Paul Kennets house insulation project very inspiring but I didn't really want polystyrene inside the house where it could rain down through the micro gaps in the T&G ceiling. But the method made sense.
My belief is that an unwanted singular thing can be a problem, waste I guess - but a lot of an unwanted thing is normally a resource I started looking for insulation options from the wastestream. It didn't take long to find bedding grade polyester fibre insulation offcuts through the Christchurch waste exchange Terranova. Toby and I needed a shipping container so as it was travelling empty I took a day to fill it with free insulation in Christchurch and ship it down.
So the last few months has been the occasional session of ripping up 30m3 of insulation and blowing it into the roof space with a Ryobi leaf blower on suck (over 200kmh muzzle velocity!). Kinda noisy and mindless work but it already seems warmer.
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