If you're like me, you're interested in taking advantage of the new "greener" glass wool (fiberglass) insulation products when building your critical listening spaces. You're also interested in the healthier (non formaldehyde) alternatives to conventional glass wool products.
While doing your research, especially in select european countries, you've probably noticed that many insulation companies don't publish their density numbers. This drove me nuts enough to pick up the phone today and actually chat with the specialist for Knauf in my region.
During that conversation, I leaned a little rule of thumb that will help us all determine the density of ECOSE glass wool insulation wherever you happen to be in the world.
That's because, pretty much every distributor around the world publishes the Lambda value of a given insulation product.
Basically, if you know the Lamda number for a given ECOSE product, you can determine the density. The lower the Lambda number, the higher the density. Low Lambda, high density.
Here's the breakdown for ECOSE products specifically (the first number is the Lambda value, the number after it on the same line is the density):
Lambda -- Density
0,032 -- 25 Kg/m3
0,033 -- 21 Kg/m3
0,035 -- 19 Kg/m3
0,037 -- 15.5 Kg/m3
0,039 -- 13.6 Kg/m3
So... using the conventional wisdom of 30 kg/m3 for glass wool products (which ECOSE is), an ECOSE product with a lambda of 32 would be the best choice. That's because, the 25 kg/m3 number is the nominal density. I'm sure there are others here who can explain this "nominal" better than I, but essentially, from what I understood from today's conversation, that 25 number actually goes up slightly as the insulation expands to its full "puffed up" state. Hopefully others can chime in and help bring even more clarity to that.
Anyway... hope this helps someone. This information would have saved me a couple of weeks of searching.
- VJ