From my one time experience I would say if you are starting from scratch, or just roles, it would be somewhat feasible to do it as a one man operation, but do not recommend it. Try a neighbor, friend, co-worker before just attempting it yourself.
If you are still interested in doing it yourself, you lose a lot of the niceness of blowing insulation, and have to work with pushing it into corners and shoveling it. I would recommend the following:
- prep the area by marking clearly how deep you want the insulation. You can find some calculators out there, if you are using cellulose it is about R-3.5 per inch, I think fiber is around R-2.7, might want to double check. You can easily mark it either with multiple yard strips, a pen on each beam, or a string running the length across and secured at the correct height, this will help greatly in making sure you get a level amount. Since you are starting with only rolled insulation down this will make it easy to follow the next step.
- Secure the hose in the attic in a location near where you want insulation blown. Since you won't be up there to guide it I recommend hanging it from about shoulder height, probably in two spots so as to allow the hose to point in a single direction.
- Go down to the blower and begin feeding in bales, examine the tube while it is blowing to make sure insulation is actually making it through. You might try 5 bales at first, but we did 10 at a time.
- Once you have fed your bales in, go up to the attic and begin brooming, racking, or somehow pushing the insulation, start in the back corners and pile it until it reaches that line you made in step 1. Make sure not to compress the insulation, it needs to be fluffed to be most effective.
- repeat steps 2 through 4 until you have finished your insulation
One caveat is you may run out of insulation. I found that my estimates for how much insulation I should have were off and was only able to do about 2/3 of the house, our bedroom could still use a bit more insulation. I would say this might take you 3x or 4x the time to do than if you had a second person feeding while you blew the insulation in.
After reading online the estimated time per bale is about 5 minutes. If it's taking you longer than that to feed a bale in something might be wrong.
I hope this helps, and good luck.