Another Dumb Idea

If,,, if I were to build a heated shop, it hit me tonight, what if I were to use ground up corn cobs for insulation? A poor mans insulation. I have been looking at YouTube at all of these rocket stove and they burn wood pellets. They also like to burn waist oil. Waist oil I have and cobs I can get.

As long as you can keep the material dry, varmint, and insect free, I guess the only drawback might be fire insurance.

I will pass on this idea. I didn't think about varmints or fire. Oh well.

jaybmiller wrote: re: They's gotta be other good uses for all them by products COMPOST ! Give back to Mother Nature what you took. I keep increasing my compost additions to the wife's veggie gardens and it's now a TREAT to rototill. Veggies grow real nice....

Play it safe get 4 politicians one in each corner That will give you enough HOT air to heat a 40 by 60 barn

You won't be able to put the corn cob against the metal cause the metal siding would sweat and the the corn cob would hold the moister and mold and rust out the siding.

Still, I would like to have a 5 gallon bucket of crushed up cobs. I have a hankering to build one of them rocket stoves I see on youtube. They should make things hot. 

cobs will also absorb any humidity there is (fast). and i'm sure they would settle down over time and leave gaps. I to had thought about straw bale walls for a new house, all the vids I saw used the small square bales, so I thought maybe using the big square bales instead, I then called the person that is sposed to be an expert on the straw building process and they told me the big bales wouldn't work (???????)! guess i'd try a small building with the cobs in the walls, use see through plexiglass on the inside walls so you can see what goes on in there.

Plexiglass isn't cheap....but it's a good idee...  Why not use news paper like they did back around the turn of the century?  And then they burned the corn cobs for heat.

How much time are you going to be spending out there working in it Tim?  They used to use cardboard also.  If you asked all your neighbors to start saving their Amazon boxes.....

Andy E wrote: Play it safe get 4 politicians one in each corner That will give you enough HOT air to heat a 40 by 60 barn

Yeah, but that is TOXIC air...

Maybe you need to have everyone save you the foam peanut they use for packing for insulation

When they chopped the papers, they are sprayed with a fire retardant of sorts, so you could do that with cobs too. Rodents and other vermin will be a problem.

Dad built a wood shop based on a chicken coop design--2"x6" stud construction, windows to the South, no windows on the East and North, and a small window to the West.  Blown in insulation with a hinged inside inspection door between 2 studs--on opening the door you could see through the visquine vapor barrier at the insulation.  Yes, it did settle a LITTLE but not much.  Super insulation in the ceiling too.  Nothing ever froze in there, even when the wood stove wasn't running.  R. Musgrave

Growing up there were 10 large, each 40 x 80 by 40 ft height, ice house storage building across the highway from our house . They cut ice from the lake on our side of the highway and hauled it about a 1/4 mile up the highway to the ice houses - much of that hauling was done by teams of horses . Later by kind of stripped down trucks as no license plated then needed to run on State highway . 
 Those 10 buildings were all connected wall to wall with like 10x10 upright timbers with 1x6 shiplap wall - in between was sawdust insulation - I can remember going up with a wagon and getting ice there - and also late in the summer exploring those buildings and seeing large ice blocks covered in sawdust as they spread that between the blocks and around them to keep them from freezing together into one big lump .
  I worked on doing some grading around a house built out of straw bales which then were sprayed with concrete - kind of between gunite and stucco as both inside and outside of building were sprayed to cover straw . 
 Can't say It was a attractive looking structure inside or out .