You finally bought that house you have always wanted and it is time to finally get to work fixing it up. Some rooms, or maybe all of them, require new drywall. And just to add insult to injury, the fastener screws need replaced and there isn’t any insulation! Tighten your work gloves and ready those drywall power tools because you have a lot of work to do.
First off, it is best to get acquainted with the mechanical fastening system. At first that sounds intimidated. Do not be. Have you ever screwed two objects together with a threaded screw? Or maybe assembled a desk using a nut and bolt? Congratulations! You have just used a type of mechanical fastening system. Once you know that, drywalling becomes a simple task of fastening it to your wooden structure.
The reason to be familiar with the mechanical fastening system is because, generally speaking, drywall installation employs this system. But before you start putting up drywall, you should be concerned with insulation.
When you cool and heat your home, regardless of the seasons, it is important that your home contains the warmth from your heaters or the cool air from your HVAC systems. You are not heating and cooling the outside, right? The insulation’s job is to prevent, or at the very least reduce, the amount of heating and cooling escapes into the open air while at the same time preventing or reducing your energy bill. This can be worrisome considering 50 percent of your energy use is just by heating and cooling alone. If you invest in the right insulation, and the heating and cooling is contained longer, you can easily save a little more, as much as 10 percent on your energy costs, in a year by being able to lower your thermostat seven to 10 degrees.
Using spray foam insulation, for example, has shown to reduce up to 60 percent of your home’s AC and heating costs in a single month. With two categories to choose from, closed-cell or open-cell, they can cover a wide variety of places, even for smaller sealing needs. It is common to see open-cell in harder to reach areas while closed-cell foam is used frequently everywhere else.
However, it should be noted when choosing foam that you be conscious of its R value. Insulation of any kind adheres to a graded system of material thickness divided by thermal conductivity. In other words, the higher the R value is, the better the insulation.