good afternoon YouTube so I'm up in my attic and it's about 12:30 in the afternoon and it's
actually reasonably comfortable up here it's only about eighty-three Fahrenheit a little
less than 30 Celsius one of the big reasons it's not that hot up here one is the attic
fans the other reason is I have this reflective foil insulation in between the roof truss bays
had one viewer asked if I could show a little bit more about that so I put this stuff in about three
years ago it's inner flex radiant foil material I bought came in these two by 4 foot sheets and ran
about 189 dollars from Home Depot for a pack of 50 which works out to about 350 per sheet and a
little less than 50 cents per square foot and the way this stuff works here it's got a like a nylon
or plastic mesh man at three places that's if I can find it there's that right there there's a
steel wire and right there there's a steel wire in the middle and then there's one at the other
end here the reason I went with this material was number one came in these smaller sheets which made
it easier to install because I had to get way the heck out there where the height of the Attic is
zero and I'll show you how I did that this is the southwest face of my roof so this face is directly
southwest and gets all the afternoon Sun and then behind me is the southeast roof that gets kind of
the Morning Sun took three sheets so you can see down there there's one then there's one right here
and then this is the third sheet so I had about 11 feet of roof slope to insulate and the four foot
strips worked pretty good because that let me have a little bit of overlap so like here I stopped the
trips short because I didn't want to cover the fans up because they wouldn't pick up any of
the attic air they would just suck the air behind the insulation there so yeah so this is a part of
the attic here that I haven't quite finished yet I'm still doing some work in this area but what
I did was I just laid sheets of plywood down over the rafters and then I could scoot out on my back
with one of these 2x4 foot sheets of insulation go down pretty close to the eve of the roof and
then the way this insulation works is it's 2 feet wide and if you bend those three wires
they're springy steel wires you bend those into position and then the spring tension of the wire
holds the insulation in a nice smooth arc there this reflects the heat back 97 percent of the
heat that comes through the roof gets reflected back and only about 3% comes through of course
the rafters themselves aren't insulated so you'd gain a little bit of heat through there but the
idea is you get most of the heat reflected back that's how I got out there I I just temporarily
laid sheets of plywood out there so I could get out over the blown-in insulation and then I put
the bottom sheet on and this stick was the magic tool you can see there's three little magnets
there's one there one there and those are spaced out just the same spacing as the steel wires and
let me show you how that works yes I came up with this little stick because I had to be able to move
this she what's a floppy sheet of plastic you know you can't you can't really do anything with it and
I I couldn't move my whole body far enough out towards the eave to get this out far enough so
what I came up with was this stick with the three magnets and you'll notice that those magnets are
lying up with the three wires and so what I was able to do was clip the stick underneath the sheet
and I could then hold this sheet out and support it and get it in place the trick is you get this
side clipped into the rafter and then you bend it and that holds the other side in but the hard part
is getting that first side so I came up with this little stick scrap a wood and three rare earth
magnets on there and that works just perfect that was the greatest little tool and that's how I put
this in so again this was inner flex it's a double layer reflective foil has the plastic stiffening
mesh and then it has three steel wires they make it in 24 inch wide which this is and they also
make sixteen inch wide so you get the width that matches your rafter spacing and they also make it
in rolls unfortunately looks like Home Depot doesn't carry this anymore and it seems like
enerflex might be closing up shop I looked at their web page and it said ceasing operations in
2017 but they're there's a number many many makers of of this sort of material that's just what I
picked at the time and again I did this pre-cut sheets because that was about all I could handle
you can imagine trying to wrestle 12 feet of this or whatever your roof pitch is all in one sheet I
had places where I had to work around bracing and various things so having these pre-cut I think was
definitely easier I think you'd pay a little bit more per square foot but it's just easier to work
with with this in halation by itself I noticed about a 10 degree drop the temperatures up in the
attic were you know approximately 135 Fahrenheit after I put in the reflective foil that dropped
it down to about 125 and before I did the foil I did these attic fans and likewise they dropped
the attic temperature about 10 degrees Fahrenheit but it was when I put the two together when I had
the foil and the fans I got more like 25 degree drop so the hottest I've seen the Attic since I
put in the fans and the foil has been about 110 Fahrenheit has been the highest I've seen so
yeah that that's my reflective foil so this was the inner flex brand it was DIY friendly it was
economical and it seems to work quite well I've noticed a definite difference 25 degrees cooler
up here but that translates into much cooler in the house because if you heat that all of this
material up here up to a hundred and thirty-five degrees that's just like heating up your whole
ceiling to 135 degrees and all that heat is going to radiate down into the main part of
the house so if you can keep the heat up here and reflect it back up and not down into the
house you keep the house a lot cooler so when the other thing I've noticed is since installing the
fans and the foil my house temperatures have not exceeded 80 degrees Fahrenheit even on the
hottest day and I don't have air conditioning or before that I would easily get up into the
85 86 87 degrees on a hot day because all of this heat up here in the attic would just work its way
down into the house and you could just feel the ceiling was just like heating element the whole
ceiling was just radiating heat into the house yeah that's my attic insulation so if you have
any questions about that post up in the comment section below and as always thanks for watching