Natural floor insulation - the perfect gift for your upstairs neighbour

You may not believe it, but it's a true story. A friend who works in the field of natural insulation for the home (floor insulation, inter-floor insulation, exterior insulation) was visited by a customer who wanted to buy a special material for soundproofing the floor. When asked "What is the surface area of the floor?"seemed not to know what to answer which puzzled my friend and made him ask him who the material is for."It's for the neighbor upstairs. He's renovating and I thought I'd give him the insulation under the floor." After I stopped laughing I thought about how simple, yet clever, the move is. You make a housewarming gift, a gesture that can turn your neighbor into a friend, and in the same money, you literally ensure your peace of mind.

All joking aside, not a few people suffer from a floor that sounds like a sounding board or hear everything that happens upstairs because the insulation between levels is either missing or is made of poor materials. About the materials used to absorb noise I propose to tell you now and especially about the natural ones. It is not a totally new subject. I have already mentioned sound insulation ininsulation with fibro-wood materials or at wool insulation. This time I'll go into more detail, focusing on hemp insulation.

But for starters, why natural materials? For a long time, natural insulation materials were bypassed as they were considered inferior in performance compared to synthetics. This is a bias because natural products often outperform synthetics. Let me give you some examples:

• Natural materials have much better hygroscopic performance than synthetics. The fibres of these materials can absorb and release moisture, reducing the risk of condensation and therefore mould. They are very suitable for insulating wooden houses, reducing the risk of rot.
• They are materials that ensure a constant temperature during summer periods. They insulate the house very well even in winter, and their performance is comparable to synthetic materials. Tests showed that in loft areas, insulation with natural fibre materials provided a cooler environment, with a difference of up to 6°C compared to similar spaces insulated with mineral wool.
• Natural materials far exceed the acoustic performance of many synthetic or plastic fibre materials,due to the combination of high density, fibrous nature, flexibility and ease of processing.
• Thermal conductivity of natural materials is better than many synthetic materials - this is one of the most five reasons why wool should be chosen as insulation material. In very many cases, houses that receive passive house certification use natural products for insulation.
• They are 'clean' products that do not harm humans, animals, plants or the environment, helping to maintain a healthy climate.Some do even more than keep it healthy, they actually help clean it. This is the case with wool, the only material that fixes formaldehyde in the air, or hemp, which fixes carbon dioxide.

Let's go back to the insulation under the floor or between floors. Why is it necessary? Two reasons:

• to prevent sound transfer. Hard surfaces, such as laminate flooring, will "ring" quite loudly on impact if they have a gap underneath them. And if we walk in heeled shoes, the sound will be annoying. But even slippers can annoy the neighbour underneath because that empty space acts as a sounding board.
• toprevent heat transfer. Heat can be lost through any partition and the floor acts as a partition. In addition, there are spaces built on top of others that are unheated: garages, cellars, terraces. Insulation between floors is needed to prevent excessive heat or cold from spreading.

The most commonly used natural materials as sound insulation are:

• fibrolematous plaques
• lâna
• hemp mats/rugs

I've already told you about wood fibre and wool, so I'll now talk about hemp-based insulation materials. Industrial hemp is not that hemp with hallucinogenic effects. It is a material with many qualities, intensely cultivated in our country in the past. I remember holidays spent in the countryside, waking up to the sound of honeydew. That rudimentary tool used to destroy the tough part of the stalks of hemp plants that had been soaking for a month in a puddle, exposing the fibres inside. The hard parts were then removed with a weaver (a large comb), leaving the hemp shuck from which various things were woven (shirts, blankets, a kind of cloth for thick clothing).

These fibres are now used to make insulation. No adhesive is used to make hemp carpet, the yarns are simply spun. Without adhesive there is no formaldehyde. There are no herbicides in the material because hemp naturally grows very tall (2 m) with large, horizontally developed leaves, so no weeds grow where it grows.

Hemp fibre insulation has the following advantages:

• regulates humidity
• absorbs carbon dioxide
• is dimensionally stable - can be mounted even without fastening
• does not mold
• is resistant to attack by moths and mould
• is fire resistant

You can find Thermo Hanf Step hemp floor insulation at Naturalpaintplus other natural materials used, both for wood finishing (oils, skies, natural pigments, lacquers), as well as for traditional wall finishing (you may remember the Traditional Moroccan Tadelakt plasterIt is available in bales 1m wide and 3, 5 or 10 mm thick. Fitting laminate flooring on such insulation can be done very easily, as you can see in the video below, without any risk of irritation or itchy hands. So, if you are thinking of giving your upstairs neighbour floor insulation as a present, you can also fit it, to make it a complete gift ... or to make sure he has used it 🙂