Fun with airless spray guns & insulation

First call of the day, Hews Grey (Who's gay?) wood yard for some battens. I plan to stick the Triso insulation up today and need 2x1's to pin the edges down

Damn tiny car

They made it back safe, although I only had to make one turn once I was out the yard to get home. Having a Hews Grey at the end of your road rocks. I love the smell of the wood and the staff are always funny to chat with

Way too much shit in my way for what I have planned. Will all the junk please clear the room?

The triso insulation

Triso is a kind of new insulation. It has a shaky history, mainly due to it being so different to normal foam insulation; it doesn't work the same way in hotbox tests for insulation. Building control in the UK is also picky about it, some regions will accept it, some won't. It measures an inch in thickness, but claims to provide the same U value as 150mm of fibreglass wool. Recently, the foil got it's BM Trada rating back. Personally, after A*'ing my way through physics without trying, getting straight ticks on my university level physics when I was finishing them in half the time of everyone else and being able to outsmart the lectures and technicians, I'm a believer in Triso. You only have to feel it between your hands to know not a lot is getting through it. This is the latest Triso Super 10. It's built up from ten varying laminates. A number of them are alumiun foil, which is great at reflecting IR. The others are various expanded plastic webs or foams that prevent thermal bridging. That rules out radiation by IR and conduction by connection, leaving only convection. That's avoid by some special tape you'll see further down. I spent a long time looking around at insulation, considering PU, isocyanurate, styrene, a bunch of weird variations and finally decided this was the quickest and easiest, yeilding the best value for money. Saying that, each insulation application will have an equally good choice depending on what you're doing. If you were insulating cavities, this'd obviously be a near worthless choice since you can't get it in there

The edges aren't sealed, so the whole lot will delaminate as you move it around if you pin it straight from the roll. I tagged some tape over the edges to keep it together, which makes it a lot easier to handle

A CAT5 luminaire I put up to see how the light would fall in the room before fixing it in place, and now it needs to come down

Junk gone, thanks Johnny boi!

Masking up the PVC for some painting. The sheeting is from Toolstation, three or four pounds will buy you a gigantic roll that I still haven't used up. It's paper thin, but that's all it needs to be. You could also use newspaper, bin bags or anything like that. Speed is key and the cost of the plastic sheet is good for me. They also sell rolls of sheet with sticky on the back for covering carpets and windows. I may try the window version, but expect it'll be easier to strim the edges with tape. If I'm dealing with a whole sheet of sticky stuff, I'll undoubtedly end up with it turning into a ball of sticky sheet all folded over on it's self

The things from the, soon to be, utility room needed to go somewhere, and here is there. The kitchen is worse, but that's the way it has to be Bamby, mommy has to die before you can run free through the forest

There's a multipack of spam on those shelves, among other food based goods. Lets hope the homeless don't raid the garden, I think they're still out there, at 2.19am. There's also a 5kg tub of potassium hydroxide. That's NOT sprinkles, homeless!

I needed to leave one door open as a way into and out of the room, so I couldn't cover this door with plastic. Instead, I was planning to mask the edges and and hold some card up to temporarily mask the bulk near the spray gun. I did get some overspray on the PVC and found it's not really a problem, since it doesn't stick well to PVC or glass and can be cleaned off with a dry scourering pad. The glass can be cleaned with a razor blade in a decorator's scraper, which I'll pick up tomorrow from my beloved Toolstation. Overspray would be much more of an issue if it was landing on things like wood or carpet

The cardboard mask, Titan 440i airless pump and 5l of emulsion. There's also some krusteze pancake mix that'll make about 5 million foamy cakes and various other waffle type batters, I thought it'd be a good idea while I was in Costco, but I've yet to make a dent in the sack. And that 5l can is a substantial underestimation on my part

Well, the 5l tin of quite expensive emulsion lasted literally minutes, and it covered some of that back wall; not even the entire thing. These pumps rip through the paint like a trigger hungry paintballer (if you've ever been to one of the hardcore fan battles, you'll know what I mean, in painful rainbows of memory). And the huge surface area of the rough breeze blocks combined with it being my first time using it don't help. It's not going into much overspray, it just lays it down real fast. Having found out how much paint I would realistically need, I downgraded to dirt cheap B&Q 10l tubs. Anyway, this is the first coat up

I'm using a 3000cfm axial fan to accelerate the drying, I don't have all day. The paint only needs the water driving off for it to cure, and boy is it getting humid in there! Unfortunately, the 440i isn't designed to spray block filler, so I had to make do with emulsion on the breeze block. Since it's so grainy, I ended up with the biggest brush I could find in one hand and the spraygun in the other, scrubbing the paint in on the second coat to get a pure, bright white finish. One thing this has taught me is that it's only worth priming the airless up when I have a lot of painting to do! The gun eats a few cups of paint just priming up and rinsing. I'm happy to have had some practice with it here and plan to have some more on the rest of the garage and garden before moving into the house, where my end goal will be shooting a topcoat of Delux Light & Space reflective paint, which is real expensive!

30l of cheap emulsion

Cleaning out the airless pump, a critical stage of the process. A lot of people bitch about this, but I really prefer it to cleaning up rollers, trays and brushes - which never get truly clean anyway. To clean the pump, hose and gun, I only have to dunk the feed tube into some water. There's a return hose as well, which goes into a waste bucket. I flick the pump to prime and set the pressure to rinse. The pump pulses on and off to dislodge and rinse the paint out the piston. Then set it to spray, remove the nozzle and fire the gun back into the paint tub. The solvent starts rinsing towards the gun, pushing all the unused paint back into the tub. When the paint starts to thin, I switch to a waste bucket. Then rinse through with some pump guard (which I think is their big name for soap) to keep the pigment in suspension and add a drop of oil to the piston cup. Easy! Only tedious part about it is needing a few buckets of water around - a few huge buckets (not the standard 10l ones) would make it simple.

Done and slick

Having been painting this house for what seems like my entire life, I've learned that it's far easier to shoot up some white and the spots that need extra attention then stand out for miles away as black dots. Those that don't, don't... I'll get the last few bits by hand with a brush. Half an hour should do it

More forced air drying, this looks like some kind of UFO storage bay

I had to pick up another tub of paint to finish off, and 45l of painting means you're going to get a bit on yourself

The light helps show up the sheen of uncured paint. I wanted this dry as quickly as possible, as it was already 8pm and I wanted to get the Triso up

Ahhhhh, treasure....... I'm waiting.....

Waiting done, I start blasting the Triso up with the TacWise loaded with some 25mm staples and the giant silver slug gets airborne. The first run of tacking I had to do balanced on top of a step, with nothing behind the ladder and it close to vertical, also turning around 180 degrees to continue the tacking, while holding the roll up. This is a horrible job to do alone. The foil, despite it's name, weighs quite a lot when you're 4 or 5 metres up a ladder that's sliding all over fresh and still damp paint. I had to cover the ends with tissue and then tape them up to stop the ripping the paint apart. That made them real slippery! Add to that handling a nail gun and trying to do a neat job of it and you've got trouble. It looks far, far, far easier than it is. Doable, but scary and hard work. There are two ladders in this picture. I'm working on the one near the rafters. A second, tripod style, ladder is helping support the foil behind me as I go


Thar she goes! It's like being in NASA on the shuttle, or a big pack of Walker's foil sealed crisps

A few hundred bangs later...

I'm absolutely soaked with sweat

Trimming off the roll for the next run

I finally have something to support the bottom of the ladder. Yay! I'm not going to be in hospital tonight

Some hours later, the space aged slug slivers it's trail towards the end

Trimming off the excess. It's remarkably hard to cut. A stanley knife doesn't work, I'm using scissors, but even those don't work so great, they need to be real sharp and strong to cut clean through

That's 15 hours worth of sweat inducing work you're looking at, in your computer chair, thinking it's easy, you lazy internet surfer. GO AND DO SOME WORK, BROWSER! Yea, whatever, I spend forever on the net, and that's why I'm pro at all this stuff

A big part of Triso working is that you need to block all the convections currents through it; the weak point of the design. That's why it needs the battens along it's edges to pin it down, and why it needs this special aluminium foil tape on those edges. They're the weak points, where air currents can circulate through the laminates. The tape is aluminium and about as thick as tinfoil, with sticky on the back. It conforms extremely well to the surfaces, even the bumpy breeze block. Way better than any other normal tape I've used to stick things to brickwork. It's like someone designed it to do this.... oh... wait...

The Roswell remains

Some tidying up of an edge, it's now 11.30pm

And a bit of taping to check it out, then bed. After Alex turned Radio 1 off at 12am. Westwood happened to be saying something quite fitting "Go into your kid's bedroom, and slap them awake, and then slap them back to sleep again! You got to let them know who's in control!". I just realized, this is the first post I've made where I'm actually putting paint onto something. I will celebrate with this slightly mouldy tomatoe, inch wedge of cheese, jar of olives and fridge full of Stella