Spray Foam Bummers: Make Informed Decisions on Insulating Your Home

there are many ways to insulate and air seal homes and one of the ways that people tend to hear about explore maybe get a bid on and maybe have installed in their home is spray foam spray foam is very well marketed and so this video is going to be an educational bit about the real life cons what I'll call the bummers of spray foam there are nine of them they are in order Flame retardants r value moisture blockage the bubble effect air sealing dependencies on conditions and installers melting or fire and insurance now before we dig into this let's talk about the reasons why you would want to use spray foam if there is an attic encapsulation that you're trying to achieve where you make the attic space part of your home everything in the home should be either inside or outside if we're trying to make the attic part of the home so you can use it to carry ducts or other services or to use a storage space or to be able to finish out later as bedrooms or other living space then you may want to use spray foam if your roof geometry is very difficult because what you'll have to do otherwise is is inject blown insulation which is called blown in blanket system or bibs or you'll have to pay someone or a team of somebody's to work like this and install bats in the roof all other scenarios other insulation types can be just as effective or even more feasible in a project so let's go through these one by one the number one bummer that I'm going to get to is flame retardants this is part of the chemical makeup of spray foam insulation and actually it's mandated it's law in the United States of America that uh spray foam has flame retardants in it these tend to be about 10 to 15 percent of the weight of the spray foam in your home these are chemicals by the way that got taken out of kids pajamas in the 1970s by law because they were proven to cause cancer and gene mutation in children so not super safe obviously those companies didn't go away they weren't just going to go quietly out of business they wanted to put it somewhere so they put it into all foam insulation and by the way rigid panel foam also has this flame retardant property in it and also into furniture foam delightful and they are not chemically bonded into the spray foam so they just come out they emanate all the time for years and years and even decades the science of whether they actually do what they're supposed to do or not is coming in season three of Home diagnosis and big hints that it's not very effective because generally you're hiding this spray foam behind a fire barrier that's going to be much more effective than the flame returns so whether or not it's supposed to be there or not it is there and the spray foam companies have to put it there and so we just have to deal with it and I would say that in that case if you have little kids and you're worried about their development if you are on the fence about whether you're going to do a ventilation system or not bringing air from outside in to dilute the pollution in your home 24 hours a day um then I would say be cautious about the spray foam equation at that point because you've got a lot of chemicals that are trying to get in and out and they might not have an easy path out through the house they might all have to be coming in second thing is r value half of all the spray foam that we're talking about which is called open cell or low density spray foam has exactly the same r value as the fibrous insulation that we would also kind of include in this insulation category things like uh in like rock wool insulation fiberglass insulation cellulose recycled denim sheep's wool it's all the same r value so the amount of insulation power that that open cell or low density spray foam has is exactly the same as all other types so you're not getting a big benefit there now there is also closed cell insulation and if you're getting a panelized version of this it would be called polyisocyanurate when it's in spray foam form we generally call it two pound density or high density or closed cell spray foam insulation and you can get double the R value there which is our third bummer when you do that you are affecting the moisture qualities of your home the closed cell when it's put on in depths that would actually help to become a really effective like getting your money's worth out of the Double R value side of the equation then it also blocks not just vapor which um you generally don't want to block vapor when we talk about vapor barriers in home that's kind of a I like to call them Vapor retarders or vapor control layers but when you say vapor barrier to somebody like me it means something that's like plastic that's going to stop vapor from doing what it wants to do and generally vapor is like a teenager if you stop it from doing what it wants to do it's going to find a way to ruin your life instead so I don't like that very much it also if you put it in a roof section is going to stop water leakage from coming from above which might sound like a nice thing except then you consider that the water has already gotten through several layers of wood to get to that spray foam insulation and now it's not allowed through so really in my practice when I'm Consulting with clients all over the country and all over the world I would generally make the same blanket statement which is closed cell spray foam insulation great if you're going to do a metal roof with hidden fasteners that's generally called a standing seam metal roof because we are basically 100 sure if it's done right it's never going to leak all other kinds of roofs I kind of assume they are going to leak sometime and then we're in deep if we've got something that's going to stop the moisture from coming through now whether you do the open cell or the closed cell we end up with a plastic bubble effect this is uh partly based on advice that I actually got from a veteran spray foam installer his name is Robert LePage I have a interview with him that I'm posting on the screen right now he does not recommend ever doing spray foam of roof and of wools either or not both and it's because if you do all of them and I've even had clients where all of the Interior partition floors and interior partition walls were also filled with spray foam I'm not sure why but uh probably somebody made a lot of money on spray foam that day but those are going to all be emanating again back to the bummer number one which is the flame retardants and also any other chemicals that we might care about which I am not including in this video because uh it doesn't matter ultimately all spray Foams whether they're called bio-based or soy based or pollen based or whatever contain polyurethane and those chemicals are there and that's the topic for another video I'm going to let the building materials Health experts dig into that one now the reason that you might consider putting spray foam all over your house or you might get a bid to do that because of course they would love to sell it to you it's twice three times four times as expensive in most cases as regular insulation is that they're promising you air tightness as well as insulation um now this is one of the uh horribly widespread myths that I would like to bust for you right now has having been a hers Raider uh in Chicago and having seen many many new construction homes that were going up and inspected these spray foam jobs I can tell you that I have seen spray foam installations that cost twice three times three four times as much as fiberglass uh bats which are like generally if we're talking about insulation that's like ugh that's the worst kind that you can get and I've seen spray foam jobs that were worse than the worst fiberglass bat insulation I've ever seen so just consider that that you're you don't know exactly what you're getting and often and almost everyone who's talking about high performance building on YouTube right now will say the same thing which is that at best you could call spray foam an unreliable air tightness layer so you cannot depend on that as your air tightness you need to do something like an integrated WRB on the outside that's taped like something like Zip system force field ad hero a liquid applied layer something like that on top of your sheathing and then you need to consider maybe having an interior air barrier if you're really crazy like I am and I'm linking a video on screen now about the build of our forever home that I'm talking to you from here so the air tightness is incredibly important because of all of the factors of uh bugs we have never sprayed for bugs in this home noise here we're built next to five minutes away from the busiest airport in the entire world you can't hear any planes you haven't heard any planes in this entire video they are going by outside the temperature control the humidity control the uh all the things that go along with the air tightness which again I've got lots and lots of videos about this but it's it's a very valuable thing and since you can't depend on spray foam to deliver it why are we paying four times as much for this the next big bummer is uh the first of the two dependencies when they install the spray foam it is a chemistry experiment it is based on the mix of the two chemicals there's chemical a and chemical B and they're mixing together to react and that's what makes it expand it's based on the temperature of those two materials the temperature of the air that you're spraying through and the temperature of the surface that this stuff is landing on and and potentially hopefully sticking to also though it's based on the humidity of the air and the humidity of the thing that you're spraying onto because that humidity might prevent it from actually sticking it might end up becoming what's called unlaminated or detached the speed at which they apply etc etc you can get the idea it's the the conditions here the variability is great also bummer number two is that the installer is the most important person in this entire equation you can work on building your home for you could plan it for a year or two years or more you could start building it you could spend two years building it like we did on this house and then you have one day of spray foam installation and it gets done badly or wrong or more disastrously which we're going to talk about in a minute you could undo all of your work in that one day and so that installer needs to be very well paid very well trained consider that they are going to be in a fully airtight suit with air piped into the back of their helmets they are wearing a big you know mask here and they're in places that like are probably not the nicest places maybe your attic maybe you know the basement trying to reach up and do the rim joist at the top of the foundation wall so it's kind of an uncomfortable job hard to do right if you're dealing with an owner operator I would say that that's like probably a pretty good deal at the very least to make sure that this company that you're hiring comes highly recommended from personal uh referrals because that would be important now number eight is about what can happen worst case uh in all cases when you apply chemical a to chemical B and they start reacting with each other they expand and they also give off heat it's called exothermic reaction so heat is created when these things react and it can get up to over 200 degrees it can get hotter than that and if you put it on in a very thick layer then it keeps reacting and reacting and it ends up being kind of like if you imagine the sun you know it gets hotter and hotter on the inside and it can start doing things like melting the insulation around wires that are running through it it can do things like set fire to your home you can look it up online if you want to I'm not going to do any name calling but this is something that's like pretty bad and as a side effect of that the first thing that you would do hopefully is call your insurance company and according to the information that I have and they're not going to want to tell you a whole lot about insurance because I think that there's a big war going on between insurance providers and insurance policyholders the providers are not going to honor any damage that's done by spray foam insulation because it's not a normal product this is not something that was made in a factory and then shipped to your home and installed under warranty kind of conditions and then like oh it screwed up the entire house and my house went bad made me sick smells horrible burns down the insurance company is going to look at that as a product that you manufactured inside of your home and that is not covered so I have heard horror stories about this please don't be one of those people make sure that if you are hiring a spray foam installer and again just to revisit what I said at the very beginning there are reasons to do this um you know think about all of the positives and all the negatives and then make an informed decision don't just select the commercials and the promise of like oh you're gonna have a perfect home really win you over please do comment below if you have other things to add questions to ask I may not be the expert for them but please do you know go back to those uh videos that I've done with other experts in the space tune in next time [Music] foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: Home Performance

Views: 34,063

Keywords: home performance, building performance, high performance, hers rater, bpi, proof is possible, home diagnosis, building science, corbett, lunsford

Id: dcrXLCsPjz8

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023