Spray Foam Madness!!

Spray Foam!! Its everywhere!! Run for your lives before it consumes you!! Sorry, it just seems as though the spray foam is something straight out of an 80's horror movie. Especially once I saw the way the foam goes on and expands to its final state, it does truly seem alive. Its really impressive to watch the way it is applied and settles.


I just posted a picture of this space a few days ago, and you can see just how thick a layer of spray foam was applied to the roof in these spaces. To give some perspective, the depth of the spaces is roughly 9" and is looking pretty full. The goal was to put 6" of spray foam in the joist spaces, and that would give and R factor of something like 70. Typically roll in fiberglass insulation in this space would have an R factor of 18!! Most of the extra R factoring in the spray foam comes from the fact that its an insulator and a vapor barrier at the same time. The typical fiberglass insulation that goes into the walls does not have a vapor barrier built in - you have to put plastic in around the inside of the exterior walls to get the effect (and not at successful) of the spray foam. This is as green as it comes from an energy efficiency perspective.


Here it is up close. Its very deceiving looking foam. It looks somewhat soft and squishy, but in truth its quite firm and feels very much like the material a surfboard or boogie board is made of. Its pretty cool stuff. One of the secondary benefits of this product is its sound deadening qualities. Something I noticed immediately when walking in yesterday evening was how quiet it had become in the house. With the ambient noise decibel level in the city being as high as it is, its great to take the edge off with this foam.


One of the things that was included in the insulation package is a fire retardant caulk that is applied around all of the openings that were drilled into the frame. This caulk is meant to keep a fire contained in the event that one should start in the floor below. By closing off the open spaces around pipes and drains it helps dampen the fire's ability to spread through open spaces and makes it harder to a fire to spread too quickly for fire detectors to give adequate warning. Its a very nice little thing to be able to add to the infrastructure.


We did get speaker wire and cat6e wiring into certain spots of the house the day before the insulators started. I will talk more about this down the road a bit, but this was an important part of the re-building process for me. It is going to be great to connect the house in this manner.