green-insulation / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Hemp insulation manufactured in Canada! Nature Fibres is a young company based in the town of Asbestos, Quebec, which began manufacturing hemp insulation in the winter of 2018. As the town’s name suggests, it was heavily reliant on the manufacturing of asbestos, but those mining and manufacturing facilities are closing...

Natural building insulation materials In order to combat the climate change impact of the built environment, natural insulation materials such as hemp insulation, cellulose, wood fiber and grass insulation help us meet emission targets because they act as carbon storage. We are living in a time when the embodied energy...

Are foam insulation panels a green choice? The short story is, maybe. And the long story is, well.... When we launched Ecohome about a decade ago, our mission was to create a green building website where homeowners and builders could learn how to make informed design and product choices and build sustainable, energy-ef...

Crawlspace insulation - be careful to get it right A crawlspace comes with all the downsides of a basement, but it is just too low a space to be functional either beyond the folded plastic christmas tree and a couple of boxes of baubles. Unless there is a good reason for it, going through the process of pouring a footi...

  Insulating a basement is a great idea if it wasn't insulated when built, as before we began insulating foundation walls and below slabs (see slab on grade), it was generally estimated that basement heat loss accounted for about 1/3 of the total heat loss of a house. It is likely that such an abysmal starting place ma...

Dense-packed cellulose insulation - the History In 2005, Metric Homes of Carp, Ontario designed and built Canada's first Energy Star labelled home in Canada. This home was built with dense-packed (or dense-blown) cellulose as the wall insulation of choice. Their intent was to produce a better built home with the goal o...

Home insulation - how much do you need and where to put it: Think of the heat in your home as if it were water behind a dam, and that insulation levels were the concrete wall of the dam. Would you choose the height of that concrete wall randomly, or would want an even level of concrete to hold back as much water as pos...

New blowing agents for spray foam coming by the end of 2017 Foam insulation is a petroleum-based product and nothing will change that. But that was never the biggest problem the 'eco' building community had with foam insulation; the main issue was the inclusion of chemicals with a global warming potential (GWP) that wa...

Polyisocyanurate (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS), Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) or Styrofoam? When building or renovating a high-performance building envelope there are really three main kinds of rigid foam panels you are going to have to choose from - Polyisocyanurate known as Polyiso (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS) ...

Insulation slows the rate of heat transfer, helping keep homes warmer in winter and cooler in summer. How well-insulated your home is will determine how comfortable it is and how much you will spend on energy for heating and cooling, and in some respects, how durable it will be. The transfer of heat (or heat loss) occu...

No matter that engineers and architects long ago debunked it, insulating paint still occasionally finds its way into buildings. Powdered ceramic chips that can be added to any paint are said to reflect heat in or out of a building and reduce heat loss by staggering amounts. I was under the impression that this had been...