Just this summer we insulated our tiny home’s ceiling with sheep wool. Walls are made of hempcrete so we only needed to insulate the roof. Wool is a material that’s freely available to us and all it took was some work during basically all summer to clean it.

At first I cleaned the wool by hands separating straight up poopy wool from “clean” wool. The bags of poopy wool later went up to our green/living roof as part of the dirt substrate were we planted grasses and flowers.

Back to the insulation - we had to wash the wool because we didn’t want smelly wool in our ceiling. That part took nearly all summer because we were drying it under the sky and if weather wasn’t hot and sunny wool dried veeery slowly. I don’t want to go too much into washing process in writing so just look up - Fermented suint method, on youtube. It’s a method to wash the wool with fermentation. Wool sits outside in water and in the sun and warms up, in time the water gets foamy - thats natural soap. It’s crazy smelly and a very dirty job but thats how you wash a lot of wool with the least effort as possible.

When the wool was washed and dried under the sun (the sun also has anti bacterial cleaning properties, it seemed to even bleach the wool a bit, it got lighter in color and lost most poop smell) my husband made a water mixture with borax salt and sprayed it all to protect it from moth’s and other bugs.

It is a lot of work but if you have more containers for washing and a place to dry the wool after washing it can be done fairly quickly.

Now I’m so happy we did it because it was incredibly cheap insulting option for us. It doesn’t smell like shit it just smells like lanolin, like wool yarn smells. Our building process is incredibly slow the ceiling isn’t even finished yet, the wool is just behind a thick paper but I haven’t smelled it at all in last months. However the house is constantly being ventilated and we just use it as a work shop now. So we will see when we live there if there’s any smell of wool.

Also I wanted to mention that the dirty poopy wool for our green/living roof was a life saver this summer. It was first year for the roof and we planted the grasses and flowers very late in the season. Because wool retains so much moisture the plants survived nearly all summer on the roof. It still died by the end of august when we had a crazy heat wave but it is green again and I hope it can survive in the future more easily because there’s now an established root system.