What a great website! I really hope someone here can help me. I'm working on a 100% green retrofit of a very old house in the northeast united states, where winters are -0. It's a wood frame construction, intact plaster/lath walls on the interior, and _absolutely nothing_ in the cavities. I'm dissatisfied with all available commercial insulation options, and would like to use granulated cork, as a kind of 'pour-in' application. However, cork's made no inroads in the american market (except as composite flooring), so no one anywhere has been able to provide me with information. I have no idea what size granule should be used in such an application (on the larger side seems intuitively logical); whether it can be straight ground up cork or if it has to be the 'expanded' type; and perhaps most importantly, whether it has to be treated for flammability - I've actually put this question to several people, and they disagree vehemently, one of them insisting that untreated cork granules are fire safe as insulation, the other insisting that it's a fire hazard! (It doesn't help that one of the very scant results of a Google search for this kind of use of cork is a link to a description of a ship that caught fire - the source being the cork insulation in the walls!) Is there anyone out there who can provide me with accurate answers to these important questions?
my barn conversion forum » Materials
Cork granules as loose fill insulation
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