Secondsandco reliable?

[BerryNewbie]

Hi everyone,

New to the forum, and have taken on the very daunting task of building my own garden room. For insulation I wanted to buy second hand PIR boards from a company called secondsandco.co.uk. Does anyone know if this company is trustworthy and reliable?

Also, I wanted to use woodfiber board initially but that’s so much more expensive. Is PIR okay to use? I know it insulates well but somehow I’m dreading damp as it’s not breathable.

any thoughts/recs/feedback super appreciated. Thanks!

B.Newbie

 

[robinbanks]

Excellent experience with secondsandco, but they price fairly randomly on pallets so it's worth working out the cubic metre price of what you're buying. Don't assume that just because it's in their site it's automatically cheap. Let's take a look:

As a base line, brand new grade A PIR is approximately 100£ per cubic metre ex vat.
Pallet 33 is 1.2x0.45x0.12x48=3.11 so that's 400 ex vat for 3 cube. That's actually 33% dearer than brand new grade A. Pallet 32 on the other hand is 2.4x1.2x0.095x15=4.1 cube and at 270/4.1=65£ per cube it's a good discount over new

They sell taper boards often. These are boards that have a slope, intended for installing so they form a fall for flat roofs. You can turn these boards back into straight boards by investing in a cheap bandsaw and cutting the boards into strips as thick as you want. For example if you want 90mm in your walls and then have cheapo 130 taper to 110boards, you cut them into 90mm wide strips along the taper (so one end is thick and the other end is thin) then mate them together, a thick end to a thin; you just made a 0.24x1.2x0.1 that's a nice cube out of a couple of slices from a taper sheet

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Seconds and co can be slow to deliver; they wait until they have the right amount to fill a truck well and you're one of the multi drops it makes.. Order well in advance of needing

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Re damp, down worry about it. Line the inside of your walls with a membrane that stops moisture getting into structure. Arrange a separate ventilation strategy; I'd consider something like a VentAxia Tempra heat recovering extractor fan for a single room occasional use like yours

 

[BerryNewbie]

Thanks man! Very kind and very elaborate. I’m actually starting to doubt whether I need PIR at all, as I’m adding material for sound insulation. Without the PIR, the wall layers would be (from outside in):
- 40 mm tongue and groove timber
- 2 layers of r14 (3,5 inch) fibreglass
- one or two layers of 15mm acoustic plaster board.

Do you reckon I might as well leave out the PIR? It’s meant to be an office all year round!

Thanks again!

 

[robinbanks]

Personally I'd use PIR instead of wool but do the heat loss calcs and see the running cost difference. Wool is a lot easier to install, but less performant

 

[MNW67]

as I’m adding material for sound insulation.

I responded yesterday on the other thread in General Discussion. For some reason those posts got deleted.

So, the same points are repeated here:

Why are you adding sound insulation? I think the design of walls is very important if you want to prevent noise. I read that the same wall elements combined in different ways can give very different results. But I think I also read that windows let through a lot more sound than walls.