Warming the house allows you to make life in it much more comfortable and save significant amounts on heating. Today, a huge number of a variety of modern materials are produced, excellent for insulating walls, floors and ceilings. However, most of them are quite expensive. Therefore, many owners of suburban private houses prefer to insulate their home in the old fashioned way - with mineral wool or polystyrene. At low cost, these materials are distinguished by excellent performance and ease of installation. In this article, we will understand in detail how to insulate a house with polystyrene foam.
Benefits of Foam
The advantages of polystyrene include the following:
- A light weight. Plates are 98% air.
- Cheapness. This material is much cheaper than all other heaters.
- Long enough life.
- The ability to use to warm the house both outside and inside.
- Easy installation.
- Universality. You can insulate the house with foam with your own hands in any case, regardless of whether its walls are laid out - from wood, concrete or brick.
disadvantages
The disadvantages of the foam can be attributed to its fragility and a shorter service life than modern materials. In addition, using it to warm the walls of houses in the event that mice live in them is not recommended. The fact is that rodents make moves in foamy materials and make holes. In this case, of course, the heat insulator loses part of its heat-preserving properties.
Preparation of materials
Before learning how to insulate a house with polystyrene foam, we will figure out what materials should be preliminarily prepared. To perform the insulation, you will need to buy:
- Well sharpened knife.
- Hammer drill.
- Hammer.
- Putty knife.
- Reinforcing mesh.
- The expansion bolt shield "fungi".
- Basement strips. You can take a wide profile (by the thickness of the foam) or bars.
Of course, you need to know about how to foam insulate the house. For residential buildings, a material of at least 40 mm thickness is usually taken. The best option is a ten-centimeter foam. As for the length and width of the plates, there are no restrictions. You can cut them with an ordinary knife.
Insulation of the house outside. Preparatory work
Most often, residential buildings are insulated precisely from the outside. In this case, this procedure will be much more effective. It's all about the location of the dew point. When insulated from the outside, it will be outside the walls. If you insulate the house from the inside - inside them. Therefore, at first we will consider exactly the method of isolating the walls from the side of the street.
Do you want to qualitatively insulate your house with polystyrene foam yourself? Then you can’t do without preliminary preparation of surfaces! The latter must be thoroughly cleaned of dirt and greasy stains. In the event that the walls are made of wood, they should be treated with antiseptic and fire fighting compounds. On the concrete walls, all the protruding hillocks should be knocked down and the slit, pit and chips should be covered with a cement mortar. Then the surfaces are treated with a deep penetration primer.
If the walls of the house are new, smooth and even, priming them is not necessary. Very old, crumbling surfaces, as well as made of porous concrete, are treated twice. In especially neglected cases, the walls are additionally plastered by adding PVA glue to the cement mortar.
Window insulation
The answer to the question of how to insulate a house with polystyrene comes down to how to insulate windows and doors. It is necessary to start the work on cladding the building with them. Preliminarily, a window sill should be arranged. It should protrude beyond the surface of the insulated walls by at least 4 cm. The slopes of windows and doors - for fire safety purposes - are not insulated with foam, but with mineral wool strips.
Base profile installation
We will talk about how to insulate the facade of the house with polystyrene foam, or rather, about the method of installing sheets, a little lower. At the first stage, you need to fix the base profile. In the future, it will serve as a support for the first row of insulation boards. Mount it using the building level strictly horizontally. Previously, holes are made in the wall (three for each meter of the base length). Planks are mounted on an anchor or dowel nails.
Kneading glue
You can start building insulation only in dry weather, at a temperature of +5 ... + 30 ° C. The glue is kneaded according to the instructions (indicated on the package). In its manufacture it is worth using a drill with a special nozzle. Manual mixing of high-quality, uniform composition will not. After the first batch, the product is usually kept for five minutes and thoroughly mixed again.
Sticking sheets
So, how to warm the house with polystyrene foam? Glue can be applied both to walls and to the boards themselves. The second method is preferable. In this case, first spread the mixture around the perimeter of the plate at a distance of about 2 cm from the edges. Do not make continuous stripes. They must be intermittent. This is necessary for air to escape. Over the area of the sheet, the glue is poured with flip flops in 10 cm increments. In the event that the walls are treated with the adhesive, at the same time it should be applied only under one sheet. After lubrication, the foam is pressed firmly to the surface and held in this position for several seconds. Next, proceed with the installation of the second sheet. Foam should be mounted in rows and in a run-up. This means that each sheet of the top row must be installed with an offset relative to the pieces of the bottom. Plates are laid out in length along the entire building. When gluing, it is necessary to prevent the glue from getting into the joints of the joints. This will reduce the quality of insulation. Glue the seams pass separately - at the final stage.
Additional fixation
After gluing all the walls, they wait about five days, after which the plates are additionally fixed with plastic “fungi”. This step is one of the main answers to the question of how to properly insulate a wooden house, brick, block or concrete. And to insulate not just somehow, but qualitatively. In the last three cases, the holes for the "fungi" must be made in advance. When mounting sheets on chopped walls or tiled, you can drill them later, right through the foam. The length of the plastic dowels must be such that at least 5-6 cm of their shaft enter the wall. Hammer them with a hammer, so that the hat is firmly adjacent to the plate and at the same time do not push it through. Each sheet must have at least two dowels. And plus one fastener in each T-joint.
Foam reinforcement
How to insulate the house outside with foam, we found out. However, in order that the plates do not move, and the plaster does not crumble, the glued walls must be reinforced. To do this, foam surfaces are coated with a special adhesive with a layer of half a centimeter. Apply the composition from top to bottom with a wide spatula, carefully leveling. The grid (with a cell of 2.5x2.5 mm) is cut into strips and glued to the walls also from top to bottom (like wallpaper). Since this material is quite thin, it may jam during installation. Spread the mesh with the same spatula. It is necessary to smooth it, achieving complete drowning in glue. The overlaps should be at least 5 cm horizontally and vertically. At the corners, the mesh is led onto an adjacent wall so that the overlap is at least 15 cm. After installing the reinforcement, the surface passes through a second layer of mortar.
Fine finish
In the event that it is supposed to stain the facade of the house, at the next stage it is treated with putty in two layers. If decorative plaster will be used for decoration, you can skip this step.
Insulation of the house with polystyrene from the inside. Mounting plates on the walls
Sometimes it is not possible to insulate a house from the outside. For example, it is already sheathed with finishing material or some unheated farm buildings adjoin it. Therefore, we will further consider how to insulate a house with polystyrene foam from the inside. The material is mounted using a wooden frame.
On the walls simply fasten the bars of the appropriate thickness of the foam plastic size. Between them and plates are mounted. They are attached to the walls on the same dowels, "fungi." You can also additionally coat the boards with glue. On top of the foam, a vapor barrier film (with foil inside the room) is pulled onto the frame. Fix it with cubes. Next, the final finish material is mounted on the resulting counter- grill.
We warm a floor and overlappings
Foam insulation of the floor is also easy to perform. First, bars are packed on it. Next, a waterproofing film is laid between them . Then foam boards are inserted. On top of them, directly on the bars, a board is mounted. Ceilings are also insulated from above. At the same time, a vapor barrier film is attached both from above and from the bottom of the foam plates. If the house does not have an attic, it is necessary to carry out insulation from below. In this case, the plates are inserted into the frame.
What you need to know
There are several rules for wall insulation with foam:
- On a flat surface it is better to use a rigid reinforcing mesh, at the corners - a soft one.
- In wet weather, the house can not be insulated either from the inside or from the outside. In the second case, it is also desirable that there is no wind.
- If the material is mounted in a frame, an air gap must always remain between it and the final skin. That is why the vapor barrier is mounted on small blocks. The thickness of the air layer depends entirely on their thickness. For residential premises, it should be at least 3 cm. The temperature and humidity of the air inside the house is always higher than outside. Therefore, condensation forms on the walls. When using a vapor barrier, moisture will settle on it. Passing through the air gap, the air simply dries it, which is an additional guarantee of dryness and, consequently, the effectiveness of the insulation.
So, now you know how to warm the house with polystyrene foam. As you can see, this is completely uncomplicated. If you do everything correctly, using technology, carefully and accurately, you can get very high-quality thermal insulation and significantly improve the operational characteristics of the building.