Bonding slabs together
Penoplex boards can be made of various stiffness and thickness. It is these characteristics that must be taken into account when choosing the right glue. It is especially important to choose a composition that will help connect the plates to each other.
When performing installation work, it may be necessary to glue the foam boards to each other. Almost any composition can be used for sheets of a popular material. In this case, it is important that there is no gasoline or acetone in the glue.
The order of work when installing the penoplex on the facade of the house is as follows:
- Surface preparation. During preparation, the surface must be thoroughly cleaned. If old finishing material remains on it, it must also be removed. The same steps apply to paintwork. To eliminate mold, special formulations must be used.
- Bonding insulation material to the wall. This work should be started by applying the adhesive composition to the foam sheet in the center and at the edges. When glue is applied to the sheet, it can be leveled. While rotating the sheets, you need to slightly press on the base. How correctly the slabs are installed should be checked with the building level.
- If there is excess adhesive, they must be removed. If gaps appear during the installation of foam sheets, it is necessary to fill them with specially cut pieces of material. It is not recommended to use polyurethane foam.
The sheets should be mounted staggered. You should pay attention to several ways of installing the penoplex:
- Insulation of the walls of the premises from the inside. The glue dries out in such conditions for about 3 days. Then finishing work continues. Penoplex should be fixed with dowels. One fastening element fixes 2 plates at once. Dowels must be used on 4 sides as well as in the center of the product.
- Building cladding from outside. When choosing this technology, thermal insulation is carried out during the construction of the house. In this case, the building is insulated from the outside using a plaster or ventilated facade. In the latter case, there are much more possibilities for design finishing of the facade. Plaster facades allow less steam to pass through.
Such features of the installation of penoplex on the facade of the building should be found out even before the start of work. It is quite easy to glue the plates together if you choose the right adhesive.
How to cut penoplex straight
»Materials
Станок для резки пенопласта
How to cut the material
When performing various works with penoplex, the material slabs have to be divided into parts of certain sizes. Every developer faces such a problem. If you resort to a simple break in the material, the edges will be uneven, and you will not be able to make the sheet of the required size.
Therefore, the best option for dividing the penoplex into parts of a suitable size is cutting. For such purposes, different tools are used:
How to make a hole in foam material
- Stationery or painting knife. The advantages of this method include availability, lack of noise, speed of work. Cut quality depends on the sharpness of the tool.
- Often, with such work, a jigsaw is used. The disadvantage of using this tool is that it produces jagged edges. However, the work is done as quickly as possible. In addition, such a tool allows you to work with material of any thickness.
- A kitchen knife is often chosen for cutting foam. However, it must be sharpened well before work. Subsequently, the knife is heated. The hot tool does an excellent job of cutting foam. The advantages of such material include the absence of debris and obtaining smooth edges.
- To perform curly cutting, you need to use nichrome wire. For this purpose, it must be connected with wires to a 24 V transformer. When current is applied, the wire begins to heat up.
Penoplex has not only high thermal insulation properties, but also is easy to install. To work with it, you do not need to learn a complex installation technology. The use of this material provides maximum protection of the house from the penetration of cold. Provides high practicality of the material due to low water absorption, excellent strength and low thermal conductivity.
A versatile material is also used in beekeeping. Building a penoplex hive is pretty simple. The main thing is to know the design features of the bee house. In addition, this material is often chosen in the construction of toy boats. The possibility of using penoplex to create various crafts explains its popularity.
How and how to cut polystyrene at home
When working with foam, almost every one of us has at least once faced such a problem as cutting a sheet of foam at home into certain parts. The most common option is a break, but this method will not allow you to achieve an even edge and accurate dimensions.
In addition, when breaking, a huge amount of debris remains in the form of balls of material, which are practically uncontrollable, since they quickly stick to all objects around us. Therefore, in this article we will consider options and methods of the best way to cut foam, without excess debris and exact dimensions.
We make cutting by ourselves
How fast should you move the foam on the canvas? Not very fast, but not too slow either.
If it is fast, the material will still crumble, but if you move it slowly, the edges will be fused. You don’t need it.
Cutting foam at home does not require a lot of work, so this “table” should be more than enough for you.
On average, with the help of a red-hot thread, it will turn out to process about 3-4 cubic meters per hour.
This is quite enough to insulate the whole house. By the way, it is advisable to purchase foam with a greater thickness.
It is less popular and easier to manufacture, therefore it costs a little less.
But the transformer for the cutter can be taken from an old stereo tape recorder, such as “Mayak”. There, just on the main capacitors, a voltage of 24 Volts is supplied.
These are two coils with copper wire. The transformer has just two inputs and two outputs. Input. changeable current, output. constant, which is what you need.
If curly cutting of polystyrene with your own hands is done in conditions where there is no access to electricity, it will be perfectly replaced by three interconnected crowns of 9 volts each. They are enough for about 30-40 minutes of work.
Just do not use car batteries under any circumstances.
Although they have a low voltage, they have a very high amperage, which will burn the string! In the best case, it will simply burst.
At worst, it will also splash with hot metal.
The optimum thickness for cutting metal is about 7-10 centimeters. This is quite enough for thermal insulation to replace a 2-meter layer of a brick wall, or half a meter from a bar.
Polyfoam you need exactly “front”. It is marked on the packaging with the letter “F”. It differs from the ordinary one in increased density, as well as in greater resistance to mechanical damage.
It is more springy, so breaking it is almost impossible! But do not forget that cutting foam at home is most often done to save material.
If you do this too, then it is recommended not to lower the string below 5 centimeters. Why?
Because thinner foam will not give you the desired effect of thermal insulation, and even if only the top layer gets wet, it will lose most of its qualities.
The same cold, with high humidity, it will pass like an ordinary brick.
And also, when insulating a house, it is recommended to use a mineral wool slab at the same time. She has one significant advantage. she is not afraid of flames.
That is, it is a heat-resistant material.
It is impossible to cut such a stove with a red-hot string; it is recommended to use a plasma cutter or an autogen. Most often, slopes on windows are mounted from a mineral wool slab.
By the way, sometimes special presses are also used in production. They allow you to squeeze a 20 centimeter thick foam board up to 7 centimeters.
This option is suitable for those who need to save space at home or insulation is carried out directly from the inside of the house.
Anyone can use such a press. you just have to contact the nearest factory for working with metal products.
The maximum size of the slab that can be compressed is 2 by 3 meters. For home use, this is more than enough!
And the last thing. wherever you use the foam, it is recommended to additionally protect it with a waterproofing or reinforcing layer.
Than a penoplex crate
Penoplex is extruded polystyrene foam. Only when taking into account the composition and chemical properties of this material, you can choose an adhesive for its attachment. Among the variety of adhesives, it is worth highlighting several of the most popular and effective ones:
- Atlas Stopter K-20. This mixture is of high quality, therefore it is often chosen for bonding polystyrene foam boards. The glue is also used for the restoration of facades. Used in the insulation layer, this glue also serves as a reinforcement. This glue is resistant to low temperatures and moisture. The use of such a product allows you to save a lot.
- Atlas Plus. This adhesive mixture is versatile in use. It can be used for both wall tiles and ceramics. Quite often, this glue is used to fix foam. The main characteristics of such a composition include high elasticity and good adhesion to the surface. When using such glue, wall decoration is carried out even on a wet surface.
- Mineral glue. Such compositions include “Sarmat”. at a reasonable price. It is quite often used when creating various crafts.
- Titan polyurethane adhesive. which is able to perfectly cope with the purposes of installing foam on the facade. This glue has a higher price.
- Waterproofing compounds. like “Uniflex”. widely used for the installation of polystyrene foam plates. Such compositions include bituminous mastic.
- Glue “Moment” and “Emfikol”. They belong to polymer composite compositions. They are also quite often used to work with penoplex.
When choosing a specific glue for installing foam, it must be borne in mind that the composition should not have the following substances:
- toluene or benzene;
- formalin and formaldehyde;
- gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene;
- resins and solvents.
Knowledge of such means will allow you to figure out how to glue penoplex.
Advantages and disadvantages of penoplex
This insulation is in quite significant demand in the market due to a number of the following positive qualities:
- High degree of thermal insulation. Penoplex is great for both indoor and outdoor insulation of buildings. With the correct thickness of the sheets, taking into account the area of residence, the material allows you to maintain an impressive amount of heat inside the house and significantly save on heating in the cold season.
- High sound insulation performance. An extremely useful quality, which is not superfluous for modern apartments, which in many cases have almost no sound insulation, as well as for private houses, especially when they are located near roads with a large flow of passing vehicles. In the first case, with its help, it will be possible to protect itself from noisy neighbors, and they, in turn, will not be disturbed, for example, by loudly playing music, if there is a desire to listen to it.
- Environmental friendliness. The insulation is not dangerous for people, since it does not emit substances harmful to health. Its manufacture is carried out in accordance with all European standards and norms.
- Low weight. Thanks to this, it is convenient to transport and move the material after purchase, as well as an order of magnitude easier to carry out installation with its participation. The only drawback of the low weight of the insulation is that even a weak gust of wind during work on the street can carry the sheets in different directions. Given this feature, it is better to fix penoplex to the wall outside the house if it is completely absent.
- Resistance to the negative effects of fungi, mold and other microorganisms. Even with a long period of operation in the open air, it does not lose its positive qualities, thanks to which it is able to effectively serve for many years.
In addition to significant advantages, penoplex has some inherent disadvantages. One of the main ones is that most of the technical fluids are capable of causing irreparable damage to the insulation. Taking this into account, it is necessary to exclude direct contact of the material with solvents, acetone, gasoline and other similar mixtures. Even their pairs can lead to a violation of the integrity of the penoplex, which will necessarily arise after a while.
How to cut penoplex at home: choosing the right tool
Before cutting penoplex at home, it is necessary to consider tools suitable for this purpose, as well as the features of their use, so that it will be possible to choose the most optimal option for yourself, through which the material will be cut.
How to cut penoplex at home
During the installation process, there is often a need to cut foam, basalt wool and other heaters. Penoplex is also no exception, and before you start cutting it, you need to choose a tool that is suitable for this purpose. Basically, the following devices are used to cut the material:
- Stationery or construction knife. These tools are affordable, quiet in use and allow you to quickly cut material without any complications. The quality of the cut is influenced by the sharpness of the cutting element, which, if necessary, can be easily replaced.
- Kitchen knife. Often when it becomes necessary to cut penoplex at home, it is he who is preferred. Before using a kitchen knife, it is imperative to sharpen it with high quality. As a result, the tool should also be heated. In this state, the knife is good at cutting the material. The advantage of using it is no debris and smooth edges.
- Electric jigsaw. With this tool, it is possible to cut foam of any thickness as quickly as possible, but as a result, the processed sheets are often obtained with uneven edges. To avoid this work, you have to do it more carefully, which significantly reduces the cutting speed.
- angle grinder. Also suitable for cutting foam, but to obtain the most even edges, you need to use the thinnest diamond discs. They are more expensive, but the cut quality is noticeably better.
- Nichrome wire. With its use, it is convenient to carry out curly cutting of foam sheets. For this, the wire must be connected by means of wires with a 24V transformer. When current is applied, it heats up.
After finding out how to cut penoplex at home, you can choose the most optimal tool for yourself, through which you can easily cut the insulation with your own hands.
The secret of an old hacksaw! Useful tips for all occasions!
Cutting polystyrene foam with a soldering iron
Expanded polystyrene plates lend themselves well to processing using a soldering iron. This tool makes it possible to perform work in the shortest possible time. To carry out such work with a soldering iron, its end must be flattened with a hammer. It is necessary to put on a specially prepared part, which is pre-made from a blade, a fountain pen cap made of steel.
The blade is mounted on the end of the soldering iron. After heating the resulting tool, you can cut the material.
Expanded polystyrene lends itself well to coloring, so decorative elements obtained as a result of cutting can be painted. Each option for performing foam cutting has its own advantages, but it is recommended to choose the one that will be less difficult for you.
Cutting polystyrene foam with an angle grinder
Cutting the expanded polystyrene plate can be done with an angle grinder, using a metal disc for this work (you need to choose the thinnest disc).
Such a cutting option is not efficient and comfortable enough, since the work is accompanied by a lot of noise, and after they are completed, a large amount of debris remains.
Foam Cutting Machine
Expanded polystyrene is a good insulation, an excellent raw material for various decorative elements, which you can make yourself. For decorative cutting of foam, you need a specialized machine. There are many options for such equipment, it all depends on the intended design of the product.
The required stencil is applied to the expanded polystyrene plate, and an object is created with the help of a tungsten thread. This procedure is not difficult, it does not take much time.
Also for the equipment, you can use a construction blade, a cutter. The device of the machines may differ, but the principle of operation remains the same. the use of a tungsten filament, which is connected to the mains. With the help of such a device, you can independently make decorative elements from foam plastic of any configuration.
To perform cutting, it is recommended to purchase the following tool:
If you assemble the cutting machine correctly, then there will be no difficulties in the process of work. The main thing is to use a quality tool, to show maximum diligence and attentiveness. And to perform such work, you will not need to contact experienced craftsmen.
Knife cutting
When insulating the floor base or ceiling using foam plates, it is not at all necessary to use special equipment.
To cut polystyrene foam at home, you must have:
- Good knife.
- Ruler more than one meter long.
- Pencil.
The procedure for cutting polystyrene foam boards in this way is quite simple:
- Preliminarily, on the surface of the material, the points of the beginning and end of the cutting line of the cut are marked with a pencil.
- Next, a ruler is applied to these marks, clamped, and an incision is carefully made along it with a painting knife (it is not necessary to completely cut off a piece of foam).
- The expanded polystyrene board is turned over to the other side, and the cut is made in the same way, parallel to the cut already made.
- After making the cuts, you just need to break the foam along the mowing line.
This method of cutting material is the cheapest, quietest and fastest, and after the end of the work there is practically no debris. Be sure to check the sharpness of the knife before starting cutting the foam.
Cutting polystyrene foam with an angle grinder
Cutting the expanded polystyrene plate can be done with an angle grinder, using a metal disc for this work (you need to choose the thinnest disc).
Such a cutting option is not efficient and comfortable enough, since the work is accompanied by a lot of noise, and after they are completed, a large amount of debris remains.
How and how to cut polystyrene
When working with foam, almost every one of us has at least once faced such a problem as cutting a sheet of foam at home into certain parts. The most common option is a break, but this method will not allow you to achieve an even edge and accurate dimensions.
In addition, when breaking, a huge amount of debris remains in the form of balls of material, which are practically uncontrollable, since they quickly stick to all objects around us. Therefore, in this article we will consider options and methods of the best way to cut the foam so that it does not crumble, without excess debris and exact dimensions.
Curly cutting
Recently, figured cutting of polystyrene is quite popular, for which a thermal cutter is used. In this case, the cutting element is a nichrome wire fixed to an equipped handle made of insulating material. The thermo cutter makes it possible to carry out recesses of various shapes in expanded polystyrene.
After such treatment, a melted crust forms on the surface of the material, which gives greater strength to the material, but also closes the pores. Therefore, it is necessary to use a step-down transformer, which is made by yourself. You only need to purchase specialized transformer iron.
To choose the correct current value, it is necessary to make a rheostat, for which you can use a previously stretched electric stove spiral. To make a winding frame, you can use a ceramic or asbestos-cement pipe (pipe parameters: thickness 1.5-2 cm, length 8 cm). Nichrome wire must be wound around the pipe until the frame is completely filled.