How safe is insulation in your house ?
- Thread starter peter bj
- Start date
misterdog
Not the canine kind
I would be more concerned about trapping moisture in the roof timbers leading to wet/dry rot and wood boring buggers.
In the event of any fire, toxic fumes will mostly rise and not cause additional problems.
AFAIK most loft type insulation is non flammable, fibre glass for instance.
Remove some and test it with a blow torch.
In the event of any fire, toxic fumes will mostly rise and not cause additional problems.
AFAIK most loft type insulation is non flammable, fibre glass for instance.
Remove some and test it with a blow torch.
martin clark
pinko bodger
The contents of your house will kill you a long, long time before anything contributed by the building fabric (e.g. potential decomposition of PIR insulant under a sustained fire)
- Buy (a) smoke alarm(s).
- Buy and fit a carbon monoxide detector with a lithium battery for any room with combustion device in it (gas boiler)
- Avoid dodgy appliances. Actually - other than say smoking in bed and similar idiocies, the biggest domestic risk/causes of fires in the UK are pretty much cheap toasters and hairstraighteners/curling tongs, both of which tend to get left powered-up regardless of actual use, are dense heating loads, and often have insufficient internal safeguards. We don't see hurried speculative media-view-driven noisemaking about such things, unfortunately.
tl;dr: don't worry about your loft.
- Buy (a) smoke alarm(s).
- Buy and fit a carbon monoxide detector with a lithium battery for any room with combustion device in it (gas boiler)
- Avoid dodgy appliances. Actually - other than say smoking in bed and similar idiocies, the biggest domestic risk/causes of fires in the UK are pretty much cheap toasters and hairstraighteners/curling tongs, both of which tend to get left powered-up regardless of actual use, are dense heating loads, and often have insufficient internal safeguards. We don't see hurried speculative media-view-driven noisemaking about such things, unfortunately.
tl;dr: don't worry about your loft.
Tony L
Administrator
As a bit of a hoarder the Grenfell thing worried me a little as whilst my house is very traditional Victorian brick construction it is full up with vinyl, CDs, shipping boxes, packing material etc. There is not a lot I can do about that, but I have bought a set of four smoke alarms, a set of neat sticky magnetic thingies to stick them up without having to fart about drilling holes, and a nice chunky fire extinguisher. I'm hugely impressed by just how much fire extinguisher one gets for 26 quid. If it was a hi-fi accessory it would cost about £3k!
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Mike Reed
pfm Member
My loft is insulated with minced paper waste. Built 1989 so not very old. The free insulation/grant scam boys won't add glass wool to paper insulation so if I want free insulation I have to remove the old stuff and ring them again. Bolleaux to that. I'm going to get some fibreglass from the DIY shop and sling it in myself, when I want to have an utterly miserable day.
martin clark
pinko bodger
(Re: Tony's post) - that's a lot of cheap insurance. Dry powder extinguishers are messy, but very effective, against most fires. 27A is a lot of extinguishant capacity - it if doesn't work, run and keep running.
Dearly hope you never have to use it
PS it will have a lifetime stamped or pressure gauge attached. Do replace before expiry, it'll be 5yrs or so. It's generally cheaper now to replace than get one serviced.
Dearly hope you never have to use it
PS it will have a lifetime stamped or pressure gauge attached. Do replace before expiry, it'll be 5yrs or so. It's generally cheaper now to replace than get one serviced.
martin clark
pinko bodger
Steve - that 'minced waste paper' insulant is inhibited with borax; grab a handful and try to set fire - it won't happen.
(just read your last post - made me grin )
(just read your last post - made me grin
)Our house has smoke alarms & carbon monoxide alarms dotted about, no fire extinguisher though so maybe a a good idea to buy one. Loft is insulated with rockwool under floored joists & plasterboard on the rafters. Must admit to having not actually considered what fire risk that might promote so I should ascertain really, regardless if a fire broke out it is straight out that door if I can't tackle it myself.
martin clark
pinko bodger
That's interesting, I wonder why they won't overlay it then? I suppose that they can't prove it's fire retardant on the survey.
djftw
Heterodox Member
Just a guess, but could be because Borax is scheduled as a SVHC according to the REACH Regs. After Asbestos a lot of companies' approach seems to be to just give anything that could conceivably affect their operatives' health a wide berth whether there is a real risk in practice or not. Not sure whether this stuff would pose any risk or not, but I'd probably wear an FFP3 mask if I was disturbing it, just in case!
davem
pfm Member
We have Rockwall insulation - I asked our electrician about fire risk re heat from electrical cables in loft and he said that there's enough air circulating in and around the insulation for this not to be an issue.
I also recently helped my brother-in-law DIY board and insulate his loft with Celotex panels, and we checked online re leaving air space around electrical cables and the advice was to leave a gap. So that's what we did.
I suspect that depending on where you research this and who you ask, the answers may be different.
I also recently helped my brother-in-law DIY board and insulate his loft with Celotex panels, and we checked online re leaving air space around electrical cables and the advice was to leave a gap. So that's what we did.
I suspect that depending on where you research this and who you ask, the answers may be different.
linnfomaniac83
I bet you can’t wheelie a unicycle!
I have rockwool insulation in the loft. Wiring is minimal up there, the only wiring in the loft is for upstairs lighting which is all LED, it's massively over specified for the load.
martin clark
pinko bodger
Yes, a capacity/disspation check and if necessary 'oversized' wire is the normal route to compliance for any wiring located in the plane of insulation (for many iterations of the IEEE install regs now - though I'm no EE.)
There are other reasons to cut-away/conduit it though, esp in modern foamed insulants ( which are about 2-3x the thermal efficacy of mineral wool - increasing the local heating effect) - and that's simply to ensure there can be no interaction between the PVC cable insulation and the insulant. There isn't, for modern PIR/PUR insulants, but for old-fashioned XPS (polystyrene, long deprecated for lofts/exposed use because it burns and decomposes easily) it was simply because XPS freely 'robs' the plasticiser from PVC and the cable goes brittle/electrical insulation potentially falls -off the cores ; a problem long identified & avoided.
Simple experiment for yourselves - take a rubber band, wrap loosely around one of those nasty styrene cups from a vending machine. Muse on why the elastic band isn't any more/snaps in tiny pieces a week or so later...
There are other reasons to cut-away/conduit it though, esp in modern foamed insulants ( which are about 2-3x the thermal efficacy of mineral wool - increasing the local heating effect) - and that's simply to ensure there can be no interaction between the PVC cable insulation and the insulant. There isn't, for modern PIR/PUR insulants, but for old-fashioned XPS (polystyrene, long deprecated for lofts/exposed use because it burns and decomposes easily) it was simply because XPS freely 'robs' the plasticiser from PVC and the cable goes brittle/electrical insulation potentially falls -off the cores ; a problem long identified & avoided.
Simple experiment for yourselves - take a rubber band, wrap loosely around one of those nasty styrene cups from a vending machine. Muse on why the elastic band isn't any more/snaps in tiny pieces a week or so later...