5 Spray Foam Insulation Failures and Why!

hello everyone mike with spray jones and i'm gonna do a very interesting video today which is every failure of spray foam has a reason and i'm gonna give you five of the most popular failures the people cite to me in their objections to spray foam and i'm gonna give you five answers as to what's caused it so stick around right to the end because all five are important right before i get into this i want you to go check out the youtube channel hit the subscribe hit the notifications because if you like this content you're going to want to see the other videos and you're going to want to stay updated as to what we're doing so that you don't miss anything and you don't start messaging me about videos that we already have answers to that you'd be interested in watching okay first and very popular failure is the foam stinks with stinking foam you need to understand that i've already done a video on this and i'll put the link on the screen so that you can go and watch a dedicated video just to this topic but in canada we have certified volatile organic testing the usa does not so if you are in the u.s it's going to take a little while before your laws catch up to have mandatory testing for the foam going into residences so that you have some sort of absolute standard to test the material to and ensure that people are safe in canada that we do you cannot put a foam insulation half pound or closed cell into a residence without it receiving a mandatory off-gas testing report and having it passed all of the requirements that being said there are three causes that i find if the foam is going to stink and that is that somebody has gotten caught using past due material there are expiration dates for a reason the chemicals inside eventually uh go bad and they are not going to do their intended thing shelf life is usually six months to four months depending on open or unopened the second thing that it can be is that it's off ratio the foam is not mixed you have gooey sludgy or un completely used up parts of a and b usually it's going to be the the b the resin component that's making the odor so off ratio is a whole nother issue that's a mechanical issue and we're going to cover that later but off ratio is not a failure of the foam system because it never was properly mixed to do what was chemically intended to do the third and final point is that somebody has been caught playing games you can illegally add additives to the foam to speed it up slow it down maybe you had some leftover summer foam it's now winter and you put some catalyst in it and this can totally mess up the ratio totally mess up the chemistry of how things are going to go because everything's balanced to have just the right amount of chemicals and surfactants and catalysts in order to do its job so when you add something to it you totally throw off the recipe and now it's going to stink no matter what you've done in points one and two old material and especially somebody that's been playing with it these are very almost fraudulent things because they are violating the standards that are out there for your safety and protection and if they follow them there's not going to be an issue i have not yet seen a properly certified credible foam that has been mixed on ratio within the parameters that it's supposed to be installed stink for no good reason and that leads me sort of to a fourth outside point is that there are people nowadays that you're going to encounter that are highly sensitive and it's in their head and they are absolutely convinced that they smell something even when there isn't and they'll go around telling everybody that they smell something when they don't so there are real legitimate concerns about odor and then there's some odor that are just uh for the individual i have encountered that time or two uh but it's very very rare and usually those people if they're honest they're gonna tell you that they're highly sensitive and that they they think that they smell things when they actually don't so point number two is delamination the foam has not stuck to let's just pick the substrate because most people are going to say that they see it desponding from the studs now uh on a closed cell foam this is going to mean always that there is some type of contaminant on the stud um it's most commonly going to be moisture but it could be sawdust it could be oil it could be grease uh it is possible to uh to have things delaminate if they're off ratio but then that's not proper foam off ratio is off ratio so delamination is almost always a contaminant of some sort or you have grossly exceeded the application parameters such as your foam is rated to be sprayed let's just say nothing colder than freezing temperature right and you spray it sub freezing temperature maybe use a summer foam in the late fall early winter and the building was you know 30 degrees fahrenheit uh 29 degrees fahrenheit which is like minus one minus two and it didn't stick it didn't stick because the foam did not have the proper chemistry in it to be able to bond so you have to match up cold weather temps with cold weather foam or you've got some sort of a contaminant on the substrate now if you're doing an open cell foam open cell foams have a lot different dimensional stability than a closed cell foam and there are different techniques for how the foam is to be wetted out and how you're spraying it whether you're spraying it with a cone pattern a fan pattern uh whether you are getting liquid onto the sides of the studs or not and then there's a little bit to have to do with where your application parameters on so open cell foam is a little bit more complicated but i have sprayed some very good high quality open cell foams and as long as we were within the parameters and allowed liquid to wet out onto the stud and wet the stud uh then it bonded and stayed bond now i want to tell people this if the foam is curing and it's starting to skin over as it's still rising the skin is not as tacky and sometimes it will tack on to the side of something and then slightly start to let go that's not a desponding issue it's just if the technique is there to wet it out and let the foam rise from the substrate as opposed to almost be curing when it touches it you're not gonna have an issue number three off ratio off ratio is equipment uh it's purely equipment they have got a restriction at the gun uh they've got a they've run a drum dry they've got a plug something between the truck and the spray gun is causing an issue and it's not allowing the two components one to one to meet and to mix and there's a whole host of reasons that we won't go into because you don't really care about equipment diagnostics but that is the issue if they cannot maintain ratio and and they're spraying and the the gun is spraying just fine for two or three seconds and all of a sudden you get a big burp a big blurp and it's off ratio and you see the color change and all of a sudden you've got disgusting looking foam that's 100 your equipment and you're gonna have to get on the phone with your technical service rep and diagnose exactly what it is but you're not in a situation where you should be spraying and certainly not for the client uh you need to go and source that problem out get the problem fixed and then you can start spraying only a complete that doesn't deserve to be on the job is going to be sitting there spraying off ratio and and folks i've seen that i had somebody had a failure and they they said look at these pictures and it was clear that at certain points in time they were having issues and their gun was spraying just one of the chemicals pure out of the gun it's they needed to be fired and they were and uh they had to get that mess cleaned up all right number four overspray a lot of people complain about overspray overspray on the windows on the studs on the floor a huge great big mess that they've created well that's just common sense if you don't want to have overspray all over everything start masking things off windows doors electrical outlets put poly and cardboard down on your floors take the steps necessary to contain the mess you've seen in a lot of our videos that we're putting packaging tape on the stud face and that's why we don't like scraping studs the technique that my guys use allows for there to be quite a bit more overspray on the sides and we actually like the clean distinct crisp look of the wood that hasn't been scraped it gives a very good visual representation of where the foam is and isn't and uh i think it's just a really good way to go so contain everything with plastic tape um if if you've got a tub or a shower or tile they need to be covered up extremely well and it's cheap to put poly up it's cheap to put tape up the only reason people do not do it is they are fundamentally lazy and in a rush and that's when you're gonna get a huge mess number five is cracking of the foam so the foam was sprayed it looked like it was okay and then all of a sudden boom it just cracked it uh split uh and away you go that's going to be down to uh too thick too quick they've exceeded the cellular structure of the foam and now it has failed because what's happening is rather than the cells of the foam being round they've become stretched and they've become oblong and think of it as tearing a garment like a sweater it has a maximum limit where you can pull it in two different opposite directions and then it starts to tear that's what's going on with the spray foam it has it has stuck itself to the substrate but there was so much material and so much heat that it blew and this is this is a closed cell issue this is not an open cell issue and i'll explain why closed cell foam is going to keep rising and rising with the blowing agent and it will eventually start to weaken the cell structure so that as the foam begins to cool as the building begins to contract and expand it doesn't have the dimensional stability that it needs and the cells have to snap and let go and stress relief it's just a pure straight up failure of exceeding how thick you put the foam on how quickly uh the other thing that can happen is you've thermally shocked the foam i've seen this just a handful of times in the time where you've sprayed um a garage you've sprayed something where you can open the door up immediately you just finish spraying you you basically put the gun down you rip the tarp open you rip the door open and absolute freezing cold very cold air comes in and hits the foam very very quickly and the foam wasn't doing it done doing what it was doing you didn't let it cool down slowly and you thermally shocked it and then it it cracked it but that's that's very extreme you have to put a lot of foam on again quickly and you have to shock it very hard very fast with a lot of temperature drop immediately this is most common in garages or shops where they immediately open up the doors and or rip the hoarding down and it's now freezing cold when it comes to uh cracking the reason that open cell foam doesn't have this issue is that the water blowing agent actually the phase change whisks the heat out of the cell structure out of the chemistry and stabilizes the foam and you don't have an upper limit of how much half pound foam open cell foam you can spray you can spray it to infinity and it's not going to thermally crack it's not going to burst into flames uh and it's not going to split and do all these crazy things due to the nature of how the blowing agent is in the type of chemistry that it is so there you have it five distinct problems and their solutions and generally what causes it click on the like and subscribe in the subscriptions because you need to stick around and dispel the myths and this channel helps do it and helps educate you that spray foam is in fact worthy of your trust have a good day

Channel: Spray Jones

Views: 337,237

Keywords: Regina, 306, Walltite, Saskatchewan, SprayFoam, Homeinsulation, warmhome, homefoam, commercialfoam, betterinsulation, rightway, BASF, newsolutions, foamyourhome, nomorebatt, foammaster, sask, YQR, reginasprayfoam, sprayjones, bestinsulation, betterway, newway, foamit, newconstruction, commercialconstruction, ventornovent, atticventilation, nonventedroof, spfroof, sprayfoamroofing, hotattic, hotroofing, fiberglasssucks, wetbatts, wetglass, airleakage, badvapourbarrier, wetwalls, frostinwalls, gusmer, graco

Id: EZuIPtw2Mp4

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021