In the course of filling our exterior walls with rigid foam boards, which get a huge “mountain” of left-over cut-offs pieces, some fairly regular in shape but many just simply rubbish.
Insulation-rubbish-Pile-1
Insulation-rubbish-Pile-2
We had to strip off the paper foil off both sides of the board (sometimes, it is a glass-fibre impregnated paper and others are shiny aluminium foil coated paper) so it could go into our shredder machine.
Here are some examples of the wide range of variability of these “seconds” that had been thrown out by the manufacturers and amazingly, some of the boards had dates on them and these dates indicated that some were only a week old when we got the delivery!!
Foam-shredder-Mk1-2
The shredder dealt with the pieces that are not long and regular in shape and size, the cuboid and badly formed rubbish bits were crunched and shredded. One might had expected that by shredding these solid blocks of foam into a random chunky pieces would have generated extra volume but it turned out that it is not so bad after all. We did a couple of ton bags of cut-offs we had already collected a few weeks ago and when these were shredded, they virtually occupied about the same volume as you can see ..
Two-bags-of-insulation-shreddings
Shreded-Insulation
But we still had to make room to store this mountain of rubbish while we build the interior framework of our rooms so we elected to use the alcove outside, formed by the L,M & N walls and built a very large tarpaulin “bag” to hold this fluffy material.
Large-foam-storage-bag-1
Four corner stakes were bashed into the sandy soil and, using dismantled left-over pallet materials, to reinforce and build a box like structure. One of our 10metre on a side tarpaulin that have several holes in it (due to the covering up of the stack of OSB sheets), was used to create a bag, laid inside our new frame and weighed down with concrete blocks in the corners and stretched out upwards and clamped down around the top edge of the framing.
Large-foam-storage-bag-2
Now we got this outside storage, we proceeded to shred up the remaining irregular pieces and transferred the fluffy lumpy bits to the new super bag outside.
We then bundled up the more manageable pieces of rubbish with duct tape and move this outside too, to join their cousins, the fluffy bits.
Larger-pieces-stored-behind-the-bag
The only upheaval to this process was the demise of our shredding machine. We had overworked the motor and it got too hot and burnt out several windings inside the electric motor itself (we believe!) so the last couple of days was spent breaking up the greatly reduced pile chunks using our hands and fingers instead. It was very tiring and long winded! We probably will buy an replacement machine, later on to be ready when we tackle the insertion of more insulation board bits up into the roof rafters, but it was quicker (just!) to get it done now, rather than waiting for a delivery!
Anyway, all this material will be used in the long run, to act as more insulation under our suspended flooring on the ground floor. Nothing goes to waste!
Finally ..
The-bag-is-full-of-bits
Bag-all-covered-up-waiting-for-later
We now have our house looking much tidier and ready for the next task of building more walls for our internal rooms on the ground floor.