Insulation
Insulating the Fishroom
The second project after running the electricity was to insulate the cement walls in the room. One wall was already insulated with loose fiberglass batting held up by a plastic sheet. At first I considered finishing the walls completely with green board (a drywall designed for a wet space like a bathroom), but I decided against it.
The issue was whether or not to have a vapor barrier in the walls. I spoke with several people about it, and ended up taking the advice of a veteran home builder… no vapor barrier. He gave the following reasons for not adding a barrier:
- No barrier is completely water tight.
- Water that does get behind a barrier has a tough time getting back out and creates a mildew problem.
- Assuming I use tight glass canopies on the tanks, the humidity in the room will not be extremely high.
If the humidity does start to cause problems I can easily make use of a good dehumidifier. So far there has not been a humidity issue. The cold windows and doors in the rest of the house are not getting any condensation, so I am assuming that I am not trapping moisture in a wall somewhere that will create mildew.
Why insulate at all? The cement walls of the basement are heat conductors to the soil around the house. The Winter temperatures will cause the walls to get very cold, so insulating to maintain temperature is necessary. The most expensive utility in a fishroom is electricity. Heaters can pull a lot of power if they are all on at the same time. A well insulated room that is heated by the building’s furnace will have a lower electrical consumption. My room stays at about 79 degrees F all the time. It actually goes up a bit during the day when the lights are on. My wife, who is cold blooded, goes to the fishroom to get warm. The rest of the house is at least 8 degrees cooler. The fishroom’s stable temperature is due to the insulation and the tanks. Tanks, being filled with water, are slow to release heat energy. A couple thousand gallons of warm water will make a room quite warm.
I decided to use a system of paper-backed fiberglass bats in two foot widths. These bats are stapled between vertical boards in a frame wall attached to the cement walls. Here is a picture of the frame being built.
The footer baords are treated 2×4 in case of the occasional flood. I attached the footers to the floor by drilling a pilot hole through the wood to the floor with a masonry bit, then screwing the board to the floor with a masonry screw. The verticals and header boards are untreated 2×4. The trickiest part was insulating behind the furnace. I had to build a frame with the insulation batting installed, then screw it into place behind the furnace:
The batting was stapled to the frame wall, and then the room was insulated. The elecetrial wiring was run before I stapled in the insulation, and that is covered in a different project page.
This turned out to be a one-person job. I had scheduled about five days to complete the insulation, but finished the whole job in two days.
