Solid wall property makes up a great deal of the housing around Bootle, and over the last fifteen years a good proportion of it has had insulation fitted internally. Some of that work was excellent. Some of it is now being taken back off, usually because damp has appeared behind it. Internal wall insulation removal produces a load with a separation requirement built into it, and that is the thing to plan for. Our Bootle skip hire service handles a steady run of this.
Why it is coming back off
A solid wall with no cavity handles moisture by allowing it to move through and evaporate. Insulating that wall internally moves the cold surface, and if the detailing is not right the point at which moisture condenses ends up behind the insulation rather than in the room where you can see it.
The result is damp, sometimes mould, and it develops out of sight over a couple of winters. Where it goes wrong it is usually at the junctions rather than in the middle of a wall. Around window reveals, at floor and ceiling junctions, and where an internal wall meets the insulated external one.
None of that means internal insulation is a bad idea. It means it is unforgiving of poor detailing, and a proportion of what was installed quickly was detailed poorly.
The board is a bonded sandwich
Most of what went in around here is insulated plasterboard, which is a layer of rigid foam bonded to a sheet of plasterboard, fixed to the wall on adhesive dabs or on battens.
That bonding is the difficulty. It is two quite different materials stuck permanently together, and neither of them can be dealt with as though it were the other. The plasterboard side is gypsum, which has to be separated from general waste and cannot go into a mixed container. The foam side is bulky, light and a different stream again.
Where it has come off cleanly in sheets, keep it together and tell us what it is when you book. Where it has been hacked off in fragments mixed with adhesive and old plaster, it is a mixed load and there is less that can be done with it. Our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains why the gypsum separation is a requirement rather than a preference.
Getting it off in sheets is worth the patience
Where the boards are on adhesive dabs, they can often be persuaded off in large pieces with a flat bar working from a cut edge, particularly if the adhesive has failed anyway, which on a damp wall it usually has.
Where they are on battens, take the fixings out rather than levering, and the sheets come away nearly whole.
Smashing it all up with a hammer is quicker for an hour and slower overall, because you then have a room full of mixed fragments, far more dust, and a load nobody can sort. Whole sheets also stack flat in a container and take up a fraction of the room.
What is behind it
Once the insulation is off, the original wall is exposed and this is the point at which the actual condition becomes clear. Old plaster that has been sitting behind insulation on a damp wall is usually finished, so plan on that coming off as well.
In older property here there may be lath and plaster behind later work, which produces a bulky dusty load full of nails. There may also be earlier attempts at damp proofing, tanking or bituminous coatings, and any of those adds to what is coming off.
The dust on this job is considerable. Seal the doorways of rooms you are not working in, wear a properly fitted mask rather than a paper one, and accept that everything will need cleaning afterwards.
Sizing and separation in practice
The practical arrangement that works is two streams. The insulated board kept together and identified, and the plaster, timber and general debris in the other. On a whole house that usually means two containers, and on a single room it can mean one container and a well managed pile.
Tell us at the booking stage that this is an insulation strip out. It changes how we handle the load at our end, and it is far better dealt with in advance than at the point of collection. An 8 tonne builders skip covers most of these jobs, and a 4 tonne midi skip works for a single room.
Everything comes back to our own recycling centre, where a properly separated load gets processed rather than simply moved on. Our environmental and recycling page explains how that works.
Access and permits
A good many of these streets have no off road parking, so the container goes on the road and needs a permit from Sefton Council at £36 per month. Our guide to skip permits in Southport covers the same authority and process.
Position matters because sheets of board are awkward to carry any distance, particularly through a house and out of a front door. As close as the permit allows.
We run this area constantly, covering Litherland skip hire and Seaforth skip hire alongside Bootle, and our drivers know how tight these roads get.
Ring us on 0151 909 6399 and tell us how many rooms are being stripped. Our contact page is there if you would rather write.
