Cold weather and heating bills send a lot of people up into the loft in January, and what they find is usually forty year old mineral wool laid to a depth that stopped being adequate decades ago. Clearing loft insulation waste is a slightly unusual skip job because the material behaves nothing like normal household waste, and sizing it by eye goes wrong in a particular direction. Our Crosby skip hire service covers a lot of these through the winter months.
Check what you have before you touch it
This has to come first because it affects everything else. Most lofts around Crosby contain mineral wool, either glass or rock, in rolls or batts, and that is fine to remove and fine to put in a skip. But not everything up there is mineral wool.
If your loft has a loose granular material that looks like small shiny flakes or beads rather than a matted fibrous blanket, stop. Loose fill vermiculite was used in some properties and older vermiculite can contain traces of asbestos depending on where it was quarried. You cannot tell by looking, and disturbing it is the worst thing you can do with it.
The same applies to any old pipe or tank lagging up there, which in properties of a certain age is a genuine risk. Our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip covers what to do, and the short answer is that it needs testing and a licensed contractor rather than a skip. We cannot take it and we would rather tell you that now than have a driver decline the load.
Mineral wool is light, bulky and awkward
Assuming what you have is ordinary mineral wool, the practical problem is volume rather than weight. This is the opposite of most skip jobs. Old insulation weighs very little even when it has been up there since the nineteen eighties, but it takes up an enormous amount of space and it does not compress usefully.
A standard loft’s worth of removed insulation regularly fills a midi skip on its own, which surprises people who have carried it down and found how light it is. It will not pack down, and standing on it in the skip achieves almost nothing because it springs back.
Bag it as you go. This is the single most useful thing we can tell anyone doing this job. Loose insulation in an open skip blows around the street the moment there is any wind, and in January there is always wind. Rubble sacks or heavy duty bin liners, filled loosely and tied, make the whole job cleaner and mean you are not chasing fibreglass across your neighbour’s garden.
Protect yourself properly
Old mineral wool is unpleasant to handle. Long sleeves, gloves, eye protection and a proper dust mask rather than a paper one. The fibres irritate skin and airways, and a loft is a confined space with poor ventilation where you will be disturbing forty years of settled dust alongside the insulation itself.
Work in short spells rather than trying to do the whole loft in one go, and get some ventilation through it if you possibly can. Take the bags down as you fill them rather than stacking them up there, because a loft hatch is a poor place to be manoeuvring around obstacles.
The rest of what comes out of a loft
Almost nobody clears insulation without also clearing everything else that has accumulated up there, and in most Crosby houses that is a substantial quantity. Boxes that came from the last house move and were never opened, old suitcases, Christmas decorations that have been superseded, and usually a piece of furniture that somebody carried up there years ago and forgot about.
That changes the sizing. Insulation alone might be a midi, but insulation plus a genuine loft clear-out is usually more. Our guide on choosing the right skip size is worth a read before you book, and a 4 tonne midi skip is the size we would suggest for insulation on its own.
Permits, and where the skip goes in a Crosby street
A lot of the housing around here has limited off-road parking, and if the skip has to go on the road it needs a permit from Sefton Council, which is the highway authority for this borough. The fee is £36 per month and the same process applies across Sefton, which our guide to skip permits in Southport sets out.
Where there is driveway space, use it. It removes the permit, the fee, the lamps and the wait, and for a job like this where you are carrying bags out repeatedly, having the skip closer to the door really matters. Carrying twenty bags of insulation forty feet down a street in January is a different job to carrying them ten feet.
What happens to it afterwards
Old mineral wool is one of the harder materials to do anything useful with, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that everything we collect comes back to our own recycling centre rather than being handed to a third party, so the rest of a loft clearance load, the timber, the metal, the cardboard and the furniture, gets sorted and separated properly instead of going out as one mixed load. Our environmental and recycling page explains how we handle it.
We cover this whole stretch, running Waterloo skip hire and Blundellsands skip hire jobs alongside Crosby, and our drivers know the streets and the access. Ring us on 0151 909 6399 and tell us what you are taking out, and if you are at all unsure what the material in your loft actually is, describe it to us before you start. Our contact page is there if you would rather send us a photograph.
