WHEN PROGRESS HITS A WALL: SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT FAILED EXPERIMENTS
I’ve seen fiberglass batts fail more times than I can count, especially in humid climates. It’s wild how we default to “tried and true” without questioning if it’s actually suited for the job.
That’s a fair point, but I’ll admit I’ve had a different experience—at least in my own house. We’re in the mid-Atlantic, so humidity is a thing, and yeah, I’ve seen neighbors pull out soggy pink insulation that looked like it’d been through a hurricane. But weirdly enough, the stuff in my attic has held up for almost twenty years. Maybe it’s luck, or maybe it’s just obsessive sealing around every vent and light fixture (my wife still teases me about the Great Caulking Weekend of 2007).
I get what you’re saying about cost vs. quality though. Recycled denim sounds great on paper—who doesn’t want their walls stuffed with old jeans?—but when I priced it out for our addition, it was almost double what fiberglass cost. That stung a bit. And mineral wool... well, I tried installing that once and ended up itching worse than with fiberglass. Maybe I’m just clumsy.
I guess what I’m getting at is, sometimes “tried and true” works if you’re willing to put in the prep work. But yeah, if you skip air sealing or don’t address moisture issues first, even the fanciest insulation will turn into a science experiment gone wrong.
Funny thing—I remember my dad swearing by cellulose back in the day because “it’s what they used in old houses.” Then we found out half his walls were basically composting from inside out thanks to a leaky gutter nobody noticed for years. Sometimes progress hits a wall because we forget to look at the whole picture, not just the material.
Anyway, maybe there isn’t one perfect answer—just a lot of lessons learned (sometimes the hard way) along the way.