Quick DIY project: Bubble wrap insulation

Hi fellow Steemians / DIY enthusiasts,

It's been so unbelievably cold here in Boston early in the winter season that we felt we needed to expand our DIY insulation job that we did a couple months ago. You can find that post here.

One of the big things that affects so many people is the inability to maintain a constant or comfortable temperature in their living spaces. You can do a some very simple things to help improve heat efficiency in your home.

Cost
30 inch x 30 feet bubble wrap - $9
Scissors - $5
Double sided tape - $7
$21 total cost, lots better than construction costs!

Necessary items
There are just a few basic items you will need for this job:

A nice good pair of large scissors to smoothly cut the bubble wrap

I chose a large roll of bubble wrap because of the surface area we needed to cover. We also used this same bubble wrap on the windows in the post I highlighted above.

A high quality roll of double-sided tape. This is one is just as important as the bubble wrap because we wanted to secure it to the wall of course, but also make sure it stays there and doesn't make a mess when we take it off.

Putting the wrap on the wall
Once you have the tools, you want to make rough measurements of how much you want to cut. The way I did it was put the roll against the wall, horizontally, and roll it up from the floor to the bottom of the window.

I secured the plastic wrap to the wall in 6 different spots per section; two on each side and two in the middle. This allows it to secure to the wall in multiple locations and allow the least amount of cold air to penetrate the room. As you can also see, we have plastic on the windows as well to completely seal these poorly constructed pieces of junk.


We also put the childproof electrical outlet covers on them because sure enough, I found out that the outlets were a large source of frigid air! I put my hand up to it and could feel a breeze, it was strong enough to flutter a curtain if it was in front of it.

This let me know that the windows don't have a drop of insulation below them but it's not unexpected unfortunately. There are lots of cases where companies who build condo buildings like ours just do the bare minimum or skip steps altogether to save time and money...that's a rant for another day!

We covered the wall up a lot higher on this side of course, because there seems to be insulation higher up on the wall because they were far less cold than the lower walls were. I covered this section with two strips of the bubble wrap but I did it vertically because it covered more.

This bubble wrap exercise was certainly good to learn from. We had put it on the windows directly on the glass and had a noticeable change in the temperature in our living room. Once we also put this stuff on the walls, there was a considerable change in loss of heat from the windows and walls so it was great! Last year in the winter time, we had to keep the heat on pretty much all day. Since we did this, we've been able to turn the heat on in the morning, bring it up to a comfortable temperature and shut it off until late afternoon. Would I love to replace the windows and insulate the walls? Absolutely! But I don't have the time to do such a complicated job so this DIY hack will suffice. We will probably sell the condo and move out though, so that's also another caveat to doing that work.

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