Pole Barn Insulation for Dummies

pole barn framing

A not particularly surprising number of the DotD nominations result from uninformed freelancers who fall into the trap of, "I know how to X, can Y be any different?" While many of them don't even know how to X, we'll give newcomer Mac Pogue the benefit of the doubt (this time, at least). He's the one who dumped "How to Insulate the Walls in a Pole Barn"¹ onto eHow.com, a post that Leaf Group ultimately moved to HomeSteady.com. We were... somewhat amused.

We were amused because Pogue appeared to think that insulating a pole barn is just the same as insulating a stick-built (frame) building: you use fiberglass batts and stuff then between the studs. We had to wonder, though, whether Mac even knew what a pole barn is. After all, he introduced his copy by "informing" us that,

"Pole barns serve as tool sheds; garages for bikes, motorcycles or other small vehicles; or miscellaneous storage rooms."

Ummm, no, Mac, pole barns are a lot bigger than that, generally 30 feet by 50 feet and larger. You're apparently thinking of a garden shed. Such ignorance is probably why Mac's instructions boiled down to,

1. Measure the height of the wall...
2. Unroll the insulation...
3. ...Cut a length of insulation about 1 inch longer than the height of the wall...
4. Press the insulation against the wall, compressing it to fit...

That sequence is, simplistically, about what you would do to insulate a garage or other space built with 2-by-4 or 2-by-6 studs spaced 16" or 24"on center. What Pogue apparently did not know is that, by definition, pole barns are built with posts or columns spaced six or eight feet apart. Try "pressing" batts of insulation into that space!

It's instructive to note that in the transfer of this content from eHow to HomeSteady, Leaf seems to have "lost" the reference that Pogue used for his instructions, a Johns-Manville blog post about insulating your attic...
Given that, Pogue seems to have just assumed that a pole barn – a type of space he'd apparently never experienced – could be insulated using the same techniques and tools as a garage. As a result, he failed to provide any information about vapor barriers and didn't mention foam board or sprayed foam. Let's just say that our Dumbass of the Day proved he was as ignorant of insulation as he was of pole barns!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_8790676_insulate-walls-pole-barn.html

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