The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: OhLaLa on January 15, 2011, 03:08:42 pm
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A stand at one of the agricultural shows last year was promoting using fleece as loft insulation.
My first thought was how much the mice would love it.
Anyone any experience or tales of this?
:sheep:
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It's supposed to be very good; Fire retardant and it's certainly very low environmental impact insulation, although not the cheapest - hence I've not tried it.
Don't know whats involved in processing the wool, but I assume it would be washed at the very least. ;D
As for mice - would it attract them any more than other insulation?
mab
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I actually have a company that makes sheeps wool insulation and its brilliant. The wool is processed first...ie washed, dried, carded and needlefelted, although some other companies heat seal it with polyester. The fleece is sometimes treated with borax against insects. Mice will get into any insulation if they inhabit your loft and can cause fires and other problems from chewing cables so should not be allowed access to your loft.
Raw wool is not suitable for loft insulation due to the oils and dirt in it and the reason that sheeps wool insulation is expensive is the regulations to keep the environment free of grease and sheep dips etc. The processing costs are high. However the finished product is the safest and nicest insulation you can have and the left over bits of ours can be used to stuff kids toys...couldn't do that with fibre glass!
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Interesting replies, thank you.
Would love to know more, thewoollyshepherd, but 'mice not be allowed access to your loft'? Hoho. If only.
:D
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thewoollyshepherd, but 'mice not be allowed access to your loft'? Hoho. If only.
:D
Hehe, funny, that's what I thought!
Beth
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;D ;D ;D ;D
I have to say that of course....but in reality...... :wave:
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I insulated my loft last winter with fibreglass rolls to a depth of 18inches. It's made a huge difference but when I was looking to buy last year, sheep fleece was THE best insulation, but three times the price of the stuff I bought....
If memory serves ne right it was 4x better than the fibreglass insulation I installed... But couldn't afford it!
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Thought about using our fleeces, but was advised I'd need to soak them in borax. Seems a helova waste just giving them to my shearer though.
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No castle farm you don't have to soak them in borax but you DO need them clean.....otherwise the smell and grease will cause a problem....esp if you wish to sell your house at any time in the future :-\
Borax is used as an anti moth agent but we know and have found misting on borax, neem and tee tree will work too....but nothing is perfect against anything....including mice!! :D
The huge problem is that to make sheepswool insulation, clean wool is needed and that means scouring (washing) and drying it and then fluffing it up so it traps air...the key to insulation! This is an incredibly expensive business...believe me I know :'( and in this country with our fab environmental policies, minimum wage and H&S etc etc the costs are fair and true.....makes small scale businesses like mine very difficult to run with any profit, but do not exploit people or degrade ecosystems....!
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I am an avid fan of Kevin MLoud and his Grand Designs [programme. I remember one project used sheep's wool insulation in the walls. If I remember rightly the people building the house had ready access to fleeces, parents farm I think. It seemed to be in large oblong sections about 4 inches deep and they cut it to size with shearing scissors. A friend told me today that she has fleeces not yet used for various reasons, and i know others in the same position, so why is it so expensive to use as insulation?
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My guess is it's expensive to buy in doganjo, but I'm thinking if we have the fleece spare we should do this for ourselves.
So: If I wash the fleece (on a hot summers day) in a horse antimite shampoo (it kills mites and comes in gallon tubs), pop a decent amount of tea tree oil in the rinse, dry it, card it, that should then be fine for me to pop it up in the loft space. Does that sound about right thewoollyshepherd?
:sheep: :)
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Hi 'Woollyshepherd'
Do you/they use any sort of fleece?
Is it as OhLaLa say the cost of buying in the fleece? or is it the cleaning that is the cost?
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When I say buy in, I mean expensive for the end user i.e. the person putting it in their loft, from the 'manufacturing' point of view I suspect the cost is in the processing.
:sheep:
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I've got a raw fleece that I was going to wash and put in the loft, but haven't got around to it yet; need to wait for warmer drying weather now.
I was going to put in a 'bag' and bung it in the washing machine (set to woollens, obviously ;D ) with regular washing powder - is there any reason why this wouldn't work?
It's a shetland fleece, but it's probably not worth my doing anything more complicated than loft insulation :-\ .
mab
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This is what the laundrette is for!
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Ok guys....here is the low down on the whole thing. Fleece ....you can use any but the best to use i the kempyest rough fleece that you can find as this is easiest to keep air in. However any mix of any fleece is good. You need a depth of about 20cm plus all over your loft....this is a lot of wool as a cubic metre of washed carded/fluffed up wool is approx 16kg.....which will equate to about 28-30kg of unwashed wool or approx 10 fleeces.
It is no good to sling it in the washing machine.....you will damage the machine! The grease needs to be removed and you need at least 60 degrees C plus detergent to do this or it will stay in the fleece and also bung up your drains....I have done this in the past and its not good!
Also a domestic washing machine will not take enough at a time and the cost would be astronomical.....just for 10 fleeces!
Washing by hand is an option but will use huge amounts of hot water.....you need washing soda to get grease out plus good soap and the facilities to spin or otherwise remove the water from the fleece as if left wet for long it will breakdown.....a huge tub, lots of hot water and do it outside!
You have then got to dry it, fluff up and install, along with something to keep insects at bay....they will not attack raw fleece only washed...hence do not eat the wool on the sheep only when made into a jumper carpet etc....they eat the keratin in the wool so need to keep away.
So the effort for 1 cubic metre will take a longlong time!
Commercial scouring can be done, but is expensive and you need to send a lot of wool.....there are a few commercial scourers left in GB and they will charge around 70p per kg...but you need a min of about 500kgs of wool....and need to get it there and collect it....v expensive unless several tons!......and it comes back in unfluffed bales requiring a forklift ::) Oh and always remember that 40% approx of raw weight of wool goes down the drain....dirt, grease etc :o so if sending in 500kg only 250kg approx will come back!
Wool off the sheep is a waste product...actually classified as a grade 3 industrial waste.....that is why farmers get so little for it.....BUT processing is difficult, subject to lots of regs, lots of expense and complicated to explain!
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Thanks for taking the time to type the reply, thewoollyshepherd. Very useful info.
:sheep: :wave:
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Ditto!
Glad I never got around to trying the washing machine now.
Still, it seems a shame not to use the fleece - there must be something useful to be done with small quantities of not particularly good fleece?
mab
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I think if you (we) have the time, follow the info as per the post by thewoollyshepherd, it is worth having a go. Time consuming and fiddley yes (but only marginally more so then the process gone through by those who weave at home). I think worth a try. Nothing to lose other than a few hours and a few pence, and worth the learning curve.
Will the washing machine be ruined if the wool is placed into, for example, (knotted) pillowcases?
:sheep: :)
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Washing wool....
To remove grease n dirt properly you need over 60 degrees c and most wool washes will give 40 degrees only. Putting in pillowcase and putting on hotter wash will result in a lump of felt :-\
If you do wash at under 60 thats when the grease will coat your pipes! Please do not risk it as the plumbers bill will be high!
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Thank you - the immersion heater on full blast and the old tin bath outside it will be then.....
:-\..........
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Hi,
I've been thinking along the same lines of using fleeces for insulation, and wondered if you went ahead with your idea for washing them? I imagine there might be an issue with carding the wool afterwards? Incidentally, on the CAT website they describe spraying their wool insulation with a 10% solution of borax as moth and fire prevention. I can't afford to buy commercial wool insulation but want something natural to insulate the shed/cabin I'm building, and since there's plenty of cheap wool around this would be ideal.
Mark
I've got a raw fleece that I was going to wash and put in the loft, but haven't got around to it yet; need to wait for warmer drying weather now.
I was going to put in a 'bag' and bung it in the washing machine (set to woollens, obviously ;D ) with regular washing powder - is there any reason why this wouldn't work?
It's a shetland fleece, but it's probably not worth my doing anything more complicated than loft insulation :-\ .
mab
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Still, it seems a shame not to use the fleece - there must be something useful to be done with small quantities of not particularly good fleece?
Use it in the vegetable garden around strawberry plants to keep fruits clean, or under bark chippings for paths.
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Cor! that's a flash from the past. ;D
I didn't end up using it for loft insulation - in fact I think the moths got to it that year. Subsequent years fleeces ended up in the garden. Sadly both the shetland ewes they came from (Elfie & Estell) have been dead a few years now and my current flock are easycare.
Slightly ironic this re-surfacing now as I'm currently building a house and the popular cheap insulation (PIR foam) is in rather short supply ATM and very expensive, so I've been considering alternatives...
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I have a friend who had her home professionally insulated with fleece a few years ago. Her home is now completely infested with moths and they are eating everything including electrical cables.
She is at her wits end and apparently there is nothing that can be done apart from removing the walls to get the insulation out.
The company who installed it has gone bust so no help there. She is a pensioner and it's going to cost thousands to get it out and she doesn't have that sort of money.
Google it and you will find the National Trust are having similar problems
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does anyone know, when we brexit will we be able to get old-fashioned moth balls again?
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Did mothballs work by masking the smell of the wool from the moths? If so, might lavender bags do the job?
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Cedar wood is supposed to work too. I bought some cedar rings to hang on coat hangers
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I'm very glad this thread was resurrected ... I was going to use thermafleece in my loft - but I wont now having read this!!! Thanks :)
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This spring year I used fleece from my black welsh sheep to mulch in the vegetable patch round the cabbages, kale, sprouts etc. I read somewhere that slugs didn’t like lanolin in it and it would eventually break down. I can confirm it worked perfectly as a mulch keeping in moisture, keeping down he weeds, the slugs and snails really didn’t like it at all, and it has started to break down. Looking at it I would expect it to take another couple of years to fully break down, but I’ll dig it in this spring and see how it goes with potatoes in that bed next year.[size=78%] [/size]
Picture shows the cat inspecting my work, Ignore the nibbles from the leaves, that was the pigeons before I netted them.
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thanks for the warning Bionic - I probably wasn't going to use fleece anyway as it's still expensive - but definitely not now.
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At the risk of prolonging your dilemma, Thermafleece claims in their FAQs that "The wool we use contains a borax based fire retardant and does not require the addition of an insecticide. Hemp fibres are not susceptible to moth attack." I looked it up as a result of reading this thread because I've been considering it too.