scott brown here i'm very excited and i'm excited about two things in this exciting episode
one is we've got a building consent that's amazing we'll talk about that later number two we have a
ducted heat pump system that we've been using for a month now and i love it with all my heart
now today's exciting episode is a detailed explanation about how we insulate an exterior wall
but first i just want to get excited about this so the sun is shining for a change today
so the room's actually 23 degrees but we've had temperatures of minus one at the lowest
and we've been able to get the house to 20 degrees it has ducks that
operate around the whole house is five in total two in the living room
and one in each bedroom now all of this could just be seen as wasteful if you have a hollow
house like jess and i when i say hollow i mean the walls are empty there's no insulation in them
the insulation and the ceiling is laughable the insulation and the floor is a jerk
so now that we've spent all this money on a heat pump we need to make the house hold the heat that
it generates in today's exciting episode we're going to start by insulating an exterior wall
all right so a couple episodes back we made this a double glaze window so that's going to help a
lot we still need to seal around the window and put some rubber seals between the window sashes
and the window frame but this is another episode the window's only going to do so much if the wall
looks like this but the tricky thing is this kind of works like for years for 70 years or however
old this house is there was plasterboard here there was an open space and then there was these
bevel back weatherboards and that kind of works because you do get moisture into the cavity of a
wall space whether it's from the outside or from the inside and then it has this airspace to dry
out so we need to maintain that gap blue strap now with this blue strap we're going to put it at the
back here to stop the insulation being pushed against the cladding so what we're going for
here is we're going for like a 20 mil air gap at the back where the weather boards are these nogs
don't go all the way to the weather boards so i'm gonna feed this behind staple the top and bottom
there you go
now down the bottom here we have a nog put in place for the plasterboard and then it's got
a gap behind it the bottom plate goes out there as well putting this here should stop the water
from just sitting on the flat bottom plate it should roll out towards the weatherboards
maybe the weatherboards soak up a bit of moisture but because there's an airspace they can dry out
this stuff isn't completely waterproof and it's on purpose it's made to breathe it's made to
allow moisture to go out but stop moisture coming in so you got to make sure that the
print is facing out and we don't want any of that timber contacting the insulation
this seems to work for me where i get in the corner and i kind of fold it on itself
again you don't want to go all the way back you want to have that 20 ml so around about there
okay we are ready for insulation oh my god
sun is shining and this is my installation this is a pink bass which is like the most
common brand here in new zealand and it's our 2.2 70 mil wall insulation
in order to maintain our air gap we need the thinner insulation and it was harder to get
because i guess this people don't do this often i don't know and i'm not a great fan of glass
ball insulation you know clearly i have to wear my mask and and try and how to open the windows and
keep ventilation up but then obviously once the plasterboard's on it's not as much of an
issue but the benefit of glass wool is that you can get a higher r value for a thinner
insulation because of that and availability i'm using glass ball insulation
all right this is where things get slightly more interesting we're gonna put more insulation on
but in order to do that we need to get some timber we need to maybe cut some strips of
building wrap as well and it's going to create another layer let's go inside and um i'll explain
so with this base layer we're pretty much caught up to the minimum
building standards here in new zealand r2 is what you need in the walls
so up until i put those horizontal battens this is a standard
exterior wall insulation process it's in standards new zealand i'll
put some links below to the files that you can find i'm not just making this up
the second layer of insulation that i'm going to add is r 1.2 so we're getting up to 3.4 even if
you take off a little bit for the imperfections of the system like the internal corners of the room
aren't particularly insulated you know we're still r3 we're well above the minimum that's for sure
all right all sealed up you don't have to be a building expert to realize that
i did a rough job of that a little bit trigger happy with the expanding phone now
we have that wall insulated and i'm going to put another 50 ml layer of insulation over the top
that's what all that paper is for to separate the timber from the new insulation i probably don't
need it i just thought you know if i'm separating the timber and the insulation on the inside
might as well do it on the outside
and it was free
this product i'm using here is called stud saver and it's kind of in the name it basically means
you don't have to put extra timber in the corner simply to support plasterboard but it also helps
us in this situation where it allows us to get an extra layer of insulation over that timber
those studs are getting cold potentially moist air from the outside and they can track that
temperature decrease through to the plasterboard so rather than that happening we're going to put
insulation over it so the plasterboard isn't touching a cold surface or it's slowing down
that thermal bridge basically something jess and i say all the time when we're talking about
renovating the house is we're not trying to make the best house we're trying to make this house
the best version of itself this wasn't a house designed to have insulation in the walls with a
combination of the standard new zealand guidelines and some ideas that i've been i'll researching up
with this system r3 and my external walls on an old 1962 house i think that's pretty good
so yeah what do you think of that style of installation on the exterior wall what would you
do um type of installation system i'm very curious to hear more one of the things i like most about
this channel is it's a great crowdsourcing tool for you the viewer and for myself as well i learn
a lot in the comments section especially on topics like this jess i mentioned that we got building
consent finally i know exciting huh so exciting um i mean actually to be fair that happened fairly
quickly it's been the material shortages which have been the most frustrating that is what added
to my struggle with the insulation trying to find the right installation and then seeing if it's
available was a whole was a whole thing one thing i want to look into is in america do you have a
different r system because i've seen videos where people have r15 walls no someone said something
like ah 80 the other day i was like but that's more than 10 times well we're talking about surely
not because it would be how would you even fit it in the ceiling space that's like dimensionally
impossible a different way of measuring those pir insulation panels apparently you can get a very
high r value with a relatively small dimension so i don't know all these things to learn that's
what we're trying to do here but we're limited by what's actually available there's another thing in
those comments is a lot of people were suggesting was it rock rock wool rock rock wall rock walk is
not even available here no we do have limitations because we're at the bottom of the world and it's
hard to get things here among other reasons so we get good fruit yeah well my parents are
coming to stay with us so i'm trying to make a slow cooker balsamic beef and bake a cake
and i think i've actually ever converted myself put them in too deep so i have to keep cooking
kind of works
what do you think patrick looks great it's a soundproof room you won't hear anything outside
now and what are you gonna use to insulate your ceiling scott good question i'm leaning towards
polyester that's what i'm thinking okay and are you gonna use to build your website well i'm glad
you asked yes indeed squarespace is an all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence and
run your business so before we started advertising for squarespace jess and i used them to set up
scott browncarpentry.com it was great because the easy to use tools made the website building simple
we don't have html schools we don't know coding it wasn't necessary with squarespace if you run
a business that sell a product you can sell just about anything using their e-commerce tools if you
want to make videos to promote your business but you don't have the video capabilities squarespace
help out with their video building platform and of course squarespace have portfolios and galleries
to showcase your business and make it look pretty but don't take my word for it squarespace
also have a free trial so you have nothing to lose and then once you're ready to launch your
website head to squarespace.com forward slash scott brown carpentry to save 10 off your first
purchase of a website or domain so cheers to squarespace for paying for all that insulation
hi jess how's it going enjoy the beach so rather than hang out at our house
jess and just parents and myself come over here to golden bay which we're kind of like on the
northernmost tip of the south island i believe so that's new zealand we are we're way up here
and yesterday we went out to a beach that was way out here at the start of the spit here
and that that place was amazing it looked like the end of the world or something or something
out of jurassic park the next stop from there is like australia so yeah faradiki beach is cool very
highly recommended it's amazing out there if you're ever in the top of south island
um a couple more things about this wall uh one thing that might come up in the comments section
is a vapor barrier the official brand's guidelines in new zealand is that you don't need a vapor
barrier again i'll link in the description the pdf document where they do all these house simulations
and they simulate humidity and cold and and try and work out whether or not you need a vapor
barrier and the conclusion was that they don't and i've actually been watching a lot of matt rizzing
videos i've been learning a lot from his videos and he has talked about how he's worked on houses
that were like 10 years old and they've had these vapor barriers they've taken the plasterboard off
and they've found mold all on the back of the plasterboard because i guess moisture is getting
trapped right behind that plasterboard and between the vapor barrier because it wasn't necessary so
i'm keen to learn more about this stuff and this is only the first exterior wall that we've worked
on on our house and as we work our way around the house maybe this system will evolve maybe i'll get
some stuff from you guys and if you guys can point me in the right direction maybe i'll learn some
more stuff from someone else as well so i'm open to learning more on this um thanks for watching
this exciting episode i'll catch in the next one here's some more beautiful shots of golden bay
hmm
you