Thermal insulation of the foundation with penoplex, its features, advantages and disadvantages, work technologies. Insulation of the foundation with foam is the most popular method of thermal insulation of the load-bearing part of the building, which allows you to protect the concrete structure from cold penetrating through the ground. Our article will tell you about the correct use of penoplex as insulation.
Features of thermal insulation of the foundation with penoplex
Penoplex is a polymer material obtained by foaming a liquid mass with its subsequent curing. A mixture of carbon dioxide and freon is used for foaming the polymer composition during the production process.
Its structure consists of many closed cells, which contain air, which itself is an excellent heat insulator. Closed cells provide the insulation with a minimum moisture absorption of 0.5% by volume. Air granules are densely and evenly distributed over the structure of the material. They have a size of 0.1-0.2 mm.
The insulation goes on sale in the form of plates equipped with a mounting groove, which ensures that there are no gaps between the mating elements of the coating when they are laid on the base surface. The slabs are 600 mm wide, 1200 mm long and 20 to 100 mm thick.
In comparison with other building materials, the level of thermal conductivity of a 20 mm thick foam board corresponds to that of a 20 mm foam layer, 38 mm mineral wool, 250 mm wood and 270 mm aerated concrete. This indicates the high competitiveness of this insulation.
It is possible to carry out insulation of the foundation with penoplex in various options, which include:
- Thermal insulation of the side surfaces of the foundation and basement of the house … Usually this procedure is performed from the outside of a deeply buried structure. At the same time, not only the foundation wall, but also the entire space behind it, falls into the area of insulation from the cold, which favorably affects the safety of the load-bearing part of the building and helps to save heat in it. Insulation plates are fixed on the walls of the foundation with special glue, and in the basement part they are additionally fixed with dowels.
- Insulation of the foundation soles … In this way, the structure can be protected from the effects of frost heaving of the soil and freezing from below. In this version, the foam slabs are placed flat under the foundation on a flat prepared base. The device of an insulated blind area around the building along its perimeter helps to protect the structure from moisture, low temperature and heaving of the soil. To create it, penoplex slabs are laid on compacted rubble or sand, and a concrete screed is made over the insulation.
Insulation of the inner walls of the foundation can only be used as an additional measure, since such insulation does not solve the main problem. In fact, in this way it is possible to increase the heat savings in the basement or basement floor space, but not in any way to protect the entire structure. Therefore, to install the thermal insulation of the foundation of an existing house, you will first have to dig out its outer walls to the very foundation, although this is long and difficult. At the stage of building a building, you can, of course, do without it.
Advantages and disadvantages of basement insulation with penoplex
In many ways, the advantages of thermal insulation of the foundation with penoplex depend on the properties of this material, but the advantages are obvious:
- The coating, consisting of insulation plates, protects a thin layer of waterproofing of the foundation from mechanical damage, presses it to the base surface and creates an additional obstacle to the penetration of groundwater.
- In the basement of the house, when the foundation is insulated with foam from the outside, it becomes possible to create a comfortable microclimate. At the same time, moving the dew point closer to the outer surface of the structure has a beneficial effect on its material.
- The thermal insulation coating is resistant to temperature changes during the change of seasons, perfectly protects the foundation from intermittent freezing and thawing cycles, which increases the reliability of the supporting part of the building and its service life as a whole.
- Due to the low thermal conductivity of the material in the range of 0.03-0.032 W / (m * ° K), thick slabs are not required for insulation of the foundation, which significantly affects the cost of work.
- High compressive strength of foam on the order of 27 t / m2 allows it to withstand loads from the foundation and overlying structures.
- The temperature range of the insulation is from -50 ° C to + 75 ° C. Therefore, the emu is not afraid of either severe frosts or heating.
- The low weight of the thermal insulation slabs makes them easy to install and does not create special loads on the foundation.
- The durability of the coating made of foam is quite sufficient for materials of this type - up to 50 years. The insulation is chemically resistant in case of penetration of aggressive substances from the soil to the foundation, does not rot, does not grow moldy and is inedible for mice.
- When installing thermal insulation and after it, penoplex does not emit toxic fumes, therefore it is considered absolutely safe for use in housing construction.
- Due to the locking connection of the insulation plates according to the “thorn-groove” system, their installation does not cause any particular difficulties. The slabs are easily trimmed when fitted with a regular knife and adhere well to concrete or stone surfaces.
The disadvantages of warming the foundation with this material include the relatively high cost of work and the low resistance of the foam to fire. However, the last drawback does not really matter, since the thermal insulation coating is always hidden under the soil layer.
Technology of insulation of foundation walls with penoplex
If the house is old, then in order to isolate its foundation, it is necessary to perform a cycle of work, starting with earthen, calculating materials and ending with backfilling. Consider the technology of warming the foundation with penoplex in the order of priority of its stages.
Tools and materials for warming the foundation
To insulate the foundation of the house with penoplex, you will need: insulation plates of the required thickness, dowels-umbrellas for their fasteners, a primer for processing the foundation, a reinforcing mesh made of metal or polymer, glue for fixing the insulator and applying it to the mesh, polyurethane foam for processing joints between the elements of thermal insulation in places where they fit in size.
If the basement of the house is also to be insulated, you should stock up on special galvanized profiles with a mesh to neatly frame its outer and inner corners.
In addition to materials, you will need a container for kneading glue and a construction mixer, a perforator for drilling holes for fasteners with dowels, a spatula for working with glue, a bubble level to control the laying of insulation boards on the walls of the foundation, a brush for applying liquid waterproofing to the structure and a knife for cutting insulation boards …
Usually, the manufacturer of the thermal insulation material indicates the minimum thickness of the slabs for a certain region of construction. However, an independent calculation of this parameter will make it possible to determine its value with great accuracy.
The thickness of the foam board can be determined from the formula: R = H1:? 1 + H2:? 2, where R is the heat transfer resistance taken for a separate region, H1 and H2 are the thickness of the foundation wall and the foam, respectively, and? 1 and? 2 are thermal conductivity coefficients of the base depending on the material of its manufacture and the foam board.
Let's analyze this formula with a specific example. Suppose it is necessary to insulate a reinforced concrete foundation in the Moscow region with penoplex, which has? = 1.69 W / m * ° K and thickness 0.4 m.
The formula will look like this: 3, 2 = 0, 4: 1, 69 + H2: 0, 032, where 0, 032 is the thermal conductivity of the penoplex. Using the knowledge of the school curriculum, from here it is easy to calculate H2 - the thickness of the insulation. In this case, it will be equal to 0, 0947 m or 94, 7 mm. After rounding it up, it can be understood that to insulate our foundation of a given size, a 100 mm thick layer of insulation is required.
In order to determine the cost of insulation, you need to know the value of the area of the outer surface of the foundation. It can be determined by multiplying its height by its length. For example, for a house of 10x8 m with a basement insulation height of 2 m, the area of the outer walls of the foundation will be (10 + 8 + 10 + 8) x 2 = 72 m2… One penoplex slab has an area of 0.72 m2… Hence the conclusion: 100 plates are required for insulation.
To close the joints of the slabs and exclude cold bridges, it is recommended to mount the penoplex in 2 layers, shifting the rows. Therefore, with the required coating thickness of 100 mm, the best solution would be to use 2 layers of 50 mm thick slabs. To do this, you will already need 200 sheets of foam. One package of material contains 8 items.
As a result of the calculation, it turns out that it is necessary to buy 25 packages of plates, their total cost will be about $ 950.
Preparatory work before insulation of the foundation
To implement the possibility of isolating the foundation of the finished house, it is necessary to free its underground part from the ground. A trench should be dug around the perimeter of the entire structure to the entire depth of its load-bearing part. The width of the recess should be taken at least 1 m for the convenience of working in it.
If the house is located in an area with a high level of subsoil moisture or frequent floods, it is recommended to perform additional high-quality drainage at a distance of half a meter from the walls of the foundation at the level of its sand cushion. It is a pipeline with holes, laid horizontally in the mass of rubble. The slope of the drainage system towards the well for groundwater drainage should be at least 2 cm per 1 running meter.
When preparing the foundation, first of all, it is required to clean the walls of the underground structure from the remnants of adhered soil and solid particles. A stiff bristled brush is useful for this.
After cleaning, the surface should be leveled, since after a certain time of foundation service it is extremely rare that it remains smooth. Any sharp protrusion of the wall or a piece of reinforcement sticking out of it can damage the waterproofing and insulation layer in the future.
The alignment of the walls must be carried out with plaster along the beacons, which should be located from the base of the foundation to the level of 0.5 m above the ground. The distance between the beacons is taken to be 1-1.5 m. All of them must be in the same plane, this is controlled by the building level.
The plaster mortar should be prepared at the rate of one part of cement to four parts of sand. After mixing the dry mixture with water, it must be plastic. If made liquid, the binder will run off the vertical surface.
Plastering the walls of the foundation is required to be performed from the bottom up, using a paint trowel to throw the solution between the beacons. After filling the entire space between the guide profiles with a cement-sand mixture, the rule should be supported on them in pairs and pulled, as on rails, but from top to bottom, removing excess mortar.
After leveling, the walls should dry, this will take one or two weeks. During this time, moisture from the concrete must evaporate to its permissible value of 5%.
Important! In case of differences in the surface of the foundation of more than 25 mm, their plastering should be carried out using a metal mesh for reinforcing the solution, fixed on the base with brackets.
Rules for waterproofing foundation walls
In order to prevent the insulation from getting wet from moisture coming from the foundation, it is necessary to perform high-quality waterproofing of the supporting structure of the house. In this case, the first protective layer should be bituminous mastic, and the second - roll insulation, for example, TechnoNIKOL.
You can make the mastic yourself or buy it ready-made. If the first option is suitable, you need to buy bitumen, melt the material in a suitable container and add engine oil to the melt, which will increase the plasticity of the mastic and thereby prevent it from cracking from the effects of low temperatures in the winter season. To prepare it, you need to take 50 liters of oil for 150 kg of dry bitumen.
Liquid waterproofing should be applied to even and dry walls of the foundation and basement with a layer of 2-4 mm, all pores on the surface should be filled. After the bitumen mastic has dried, you need to cut the roll waterproofing into canvases, and then paste over the foundation with an overlap of 10 cm, starting from the bottom up.
The sheets are glued using a gas burner. With its help, it is necessary to melt the back side of each insulation sheet, then attach the canvas to the surface and smooth it, removing air bubbles. When heating, the burner should be kept at least 25 cm from the sheet to prevent it from burning. The joints between the insulation sheets should be coated with bituminous mastic.
Penoplex installation instructions
After finishing the waterproofing of the foundation, you can start installing the insulation on its walls. Fastening the foam boards should be done from the bottom up, placing them vertically. To do this, you need acrylic-based glue. The composition must be applied to the back of the insulation pointwise in 5-6 places. After that, the product should be applied to the foundation wall and pressed for one minute to fix it. The rest of the plates are fixed in the same way, connecting with the fixed in the "thorn-groove" method. The joints between the elements of the coating must be sealed with acrylic glue or using polyurethane foam. The next layer of foam must also be fixed on the glue, but the plates should be shifted to close the joints of the coating in the first layer.
On the basement of the building, the products must be additionally fixed with umbrella dowels with a diameter of 10 mm and a length of 120 mm. Each foam board should have 5 dowels. Holes for fasteners can be made with a hammer drill.
After installing the plates on the base, the dents formed on the surface of the insulation from the clogging of fasteners should be sealed with acrylic glue. The rest of the actions with the foundation can be performed only after the adhesive has polymerized.
Important! The fixing of the slabs with dowels cannot be performed on the underground part of the foundation, this will lead to a violation of its waterproofing layer.
Finishing the foundation
To protect the insulating coating from the processes occurring in the adjacent soil, the insulated surface of the foundation should be plastered again or covered until even with several layers of acrylic glue.
Before that, on the foam plates installed on the foundation and basement of the house, it is necessary to fix a fiberglass mesh to reinforce the outer layer. Its canvases should overlap 10-15 cm; a construction stapler can be used for work.
After the protective layer has dried, the trench, in which the foundation was insulated with penoplex with our own hands, needs to be covered with soil previously removed from the recess, sand or expanded clay, which will increase the thermal insulation of the structure. Backfilling of the trench should be carried out without reaching 0.3 m to its top. This is necessary to create a blind area around the building.
Warm blind area device
To eliminate freezing of the underground part of the building and the temperature drop from its inner and outer sides, which forms condensate, complex thermal insulation of the foundation is required. Its integral part is soil protection with an insulated blind area. The presence of such a structure reduces the humidity of the basement and basement, which in turn increases the service life of the building and contributes to the creation of a comfortable microclimate in it.
After completing the external thermal insulation of the foundation walls and backfilling the trench for the manufacture of a warm blind area, it is necessary to make a sand cushion t. 100 mm at a distance of 1.5-2 m from the walls of the house, then level and tamp the base. When the work is finished, it is necessary to spread a strip of roofing material 1-1.5 m wide along the foundation. The joints of its canvases should be coated with bitumen.
Then you need to make the formwork from the boards for the blind area. Insulation plates should be laid on the bottom along the entire perimeter of the foundation, and then covered with plastic wrap with the launch of its edges on the basement of the building.
After that, concrete mixture can be poured into the formwork and distributed so that a small slope forms to the outer edge of the blind area to drain water from the roof. When the concrete hardens, the formwork should be removed. As a topcoat for the blind area, you can use paving slabs, stone and other materials.
Insulation of the basement sole with penoplex
This work is carried out during the construction stage of the foundation, which can be strip or slab. It should start with marking the site on which the main supporting structure of the house will be located. After completing the marking inside the foundation contour, it is necessary to remove the vegetation layer of the soil. When removing it, the bottom should be made even. Then, on the prepared site, you need to make a sand pillow, and then tamp the base.
After that, it is necessary to make temporary formwork of small depth and fill it with a thin layer of concrete without reinforcement. When the concrete base hardens, it is necessary to lay on it 50-100 mm foam boards. The insulation should be laid without gaps, joining the products according to the “thorn-groove” system.
The finished coating must be covered with plastic wrap, the joints of its panels should be glued with tape. The film will prevent the flow of concrete mixture to the insulation.
After waterproofing the slabs, it is necessary to make a formwork for pouring the foundation and lay reinforcing cages in it. Then the formwork should be filled with concrete mixture. After the concrete has polymerized, the boards and boards can be removed, and the side walls of the finished foundation can be additionally insulated with foam boards.
How to insulate the foundation with penoplex - watch the video:
[media = https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = 0WSyRBc2aUU] A well-made and timely insulated foundation is the guarantor of the safety of any home. Penoplex is excellent for protecting such structures, it is reliable and easy to install. Therefore, there is reason to recommend this material for self-assembly. Good luck!
