Barn: insulated!

Barn: insulated!  The insulation crew finished the entire job yesterday, and the results are pretty impressive.  The blown-in fiberglass fills every last nook and cranny in the walls, which is how they manage to get such high R-factors.  It was fun to watch them work; the modern materials and machines really made the job go fast.

For example, the netting was stapled up with hundreds upon hundreds of staples, at an average interval of about 2 inches.  They did this with a staple gun that works like a machine gun – they just run it down a stud or rafter, and the staple gun spits out staples at a rate of 8 to 10 per second.  When you see how many staples they put in, you'd think they spent days doing it – but it actually went very quickly.

Blowing the insulation in was also a fast job.  A huge machine inside their truck has a hopper full of the raw fiberglass, and a large blower.  When the installer presses a trigger on his “insulation gun”, this machine starts chopping and fluffing the fiberglass, then blowing it at high speed down a long flexible hose to his gun, where it fills whatever cavity he's working at that moment  (see the last two photos below).

The bottom line: a three man crew installed top quality insulation in the walls and ceiling of a 4,000 sq. ft. barn in about 9 hours.  That's darn fast!