What is the best Insulation (Part 2)

welcome back to the build show with me jake burton and we are going to cut back into part two of the uh what's the best insulation video that published the first half last week so i hope you enjoy thanks for sticking around and thanks for coming back [Music] basically uh you can see the spray foam here is already installed uh the truck the piece of equipment that came and did that has a proportioner on it that basically heats and proportions the 55-gallon drums of material that are on the truck heats that material in the proportioner sends it through the hose completely separated until it gets to the tip of the gun at that point those two chemicals mix with each other and there's a chemical reaction that begins to expand with your open cell foam uh the propellant basically in it is water so when you see someone that's spraying open cell foam and it mixes after it's you know hit that wall cavity you'll see the steam that comes off of a moisture release right and that's and that that was the propellant of that um you know and they use different refrigerants in the closed cell as the propellants in that and so you don't see the steam that comes off of it there's still a high temperature reaction within it yeah there's an exothermic reaction that happens that you can tell a difference when you walk into a house when they're spraying foam oh absolutely that it really is all of a sudden a different temperature right right like there's you know 212 that comes off of this the boiling point of water so it uh we'll we'll add a lot of heat to the house you know while we're while we're in there working same thing with the clothes but it doesn't get to that high the temperature plus the materials when they're sprayed uh are anywhere from 109 to 130 okay two degrees is what we know what we spray them at and that depends on the temperature you know the substrate that we're working with on a you know today we're 34 degrees um got to turn our temperatures up just a little bit so the substrate doesn't pull the heat out of the material and let it expand uh we wanted to get this maximum expansion in it so that is another good conversation everything on this half of the table as long as you're able to be there working you can install this stuff you know pretty much yeah except for the fact where you're you know if you're trying to wet spray yeah now these on the other hand uh and i'm not sure the the closed cell we have here is icing uh and i know that each manufacturer varies a little depending on what their agents are and and their chemical makeup but a lot of them say 45 degrees and higher and that doesn't mean 45 degrees air temperature that means 45 degrees surface temperature substrate correct yeah so that that substrate is not zapping all of the temperature out of it we're not we're not using it to warm the house we're using it to warm the insulation right and those temperatures are you can spray in lower temperatures with open cell foam then you can spray you know with the clothes the the closed used to be for years and years was about 40 degrees they have formulas now that will take it down into the mid-20s i've seen it sprayed lower than that but what happens is you don't get the expansion of that product you're still going to get you're still going to get good foam it's just not going to be economical to spray it when you have to keep going back over it and put another layer on it so you the customer gets the inches that you were told that you're going to have sprayed in there uh and you just get you know more layers and more material in it where you know if if this house we're supposed to use a set of material and we were trying to spray it which we wouldn't want to uh but you know if you sprayed it when it was 25 and didn't have a winter type formula uh maybe it'd take a second and a half okay so we'll be using more to get the same volume just cause face temperature changes the reaction right right but uh it's what it affects is the adhesion in it too you know you want to make sure that and these products are the foam this this open cell phone basically i call it hydrophobic it won't absorb moisture the icing product won't absorb moisture however if there's moisture on that wall then this product won't stick to it i mean if you've got a if you run a heater like that for a long time before we were to come in here and start spraying and it had a real thin layer of moisture on it uh this product wouldn't stick okay so that's not very negative but it there's some negative there on it so when we're talking about the open cell close-up conversation for me i i always steer away from open cell uh i i don't like the way that it melts when it gets wet or or it starts to deteriorate if it gets wet obviously we don't want any of these getting one correct my biggest thing is i don't get the same r value per inch obviously i'm paying more for closed cell right i'm paying less for this but i also know that my drywallers sometimes will mash that corner of that rock into the wall when they're trying to and and with this product where you can you can you can destroy this product and ruin its r value uh that doesn't mean that it's not right for lots of people in lots of places but if we look at these are actually holes that we drilled in the envelope here to push vents through i can't really damage this product it it gives structural integrity to the house now we're not relying on this for any structural integrity uh and if you've ever had to take it out you know you don't want to remodel a house that has this in it but there's plenty of things that we can do to uh to try to avoid things like that for instance here at the spring valley house we sprayed it two inches thick in the walls before we did any of our wiring before we ran our mechanical line sets before we did anything it was framing windows lid upstairs and we blew it in because we have a two by eight wall we have enough cavity to the inside where we're able to run our wires and now when i go to remodel the only time i would have to deal with that is if we're taking out a wall right wouldn't be rewiring something would mean removing foam and the other thing that we wanted to do here was we wanted to prove that while we're using this product we can punch in all of our exterior outlets and wires for exterior lights and then foam them after the fact so that it's not encapsulated in the the really hard closed cell it's encapsulated in the can foam talk to me about the difference between canned foam and these two see well okay these are one one component phones uh they basically are classified as a closed cell phone uh you can you know you can compress them but it's a um it's just a different chemical makeup it's basically an air that is the propellant in it but it is a one component foam uh great for sealing around gaps cavities windows doors plumbing that goes but you know through the plates penetrations exactly from different elevations for flame spread and things like that right and there's a million companies that make these products and they all have their own little finicky like i think one of these says that it's 60 to 100 as the install range right so like it's again it's a chemical process it's not like putting bats or boards in it's chemical process you have to be aware of the parameters that the manufacturer recommend right right the expansion product as you see this one says normal warp uh used for windows and doors yeah uh you know you put this product in and it won't bow you know the window frames some of the other uh foams that you can use you know for like your fire blocking or things like that don't are a harder foam uh and so it's a little bit less forgiving around the windows and doors if you get one overfilled and bow that frame uh you know i in the past you could see wooden double-hung windows that people would overfill and it would bow it enough that you couldn't move the sash and i think that's happened enough that i think some of the u.s manufacturers at least are now recommending to stuff with fiberglass right right um but if it's installed right you know you go clear back to the back to the brick mold on it yeah that you can it'll survive yep and so here we're actually using these some of these products we're using that can foam here and we're foaming just the interior side of the window and leaving a void on the outside so that that that product has a little air space there and we're able to control it by using the right product and knowing what product we have another interesting one is i had a conversation with a major manufacturer a few years ago and their rep was explaining to me now i don't know that this is 100 the truth but he was explaining to me that the fire block product that's orange the only thing that's different about it is that it's orange and that's so that the inspector can walk up and point at it and go i see that you've done your fire blocking right so every product has its place they all have their own their own particulars so let's talk real quick about the insulation package in the walls here i'd like to return to something okay okay uh the open cell phones you can say it's come back a little bit with from your crush it has bounced back uh some so it's still holding that air that it needs to uh some manufacturers will you can see the effect of water uh that this icing product that we use they call it's hydrophobic that it's afraid of water uh but you can pass water through this product bulk water like from a roof line and have it come through this product and it'll drip out of the side out of the end of it okay without destroying the product without destroying the product okay i've seen this where it will just float in like a petri dish of water and take it out and it doesn't it doesn't break it down okay some will so i i i needed to yeah that's fine needed it needed to get that that's why you're here yeah yeah you keep me from saying something okay that's nice uh so the insulation package here in our walls we said is uh is an r42 thereabouts and the way that we're getting that if we start at the back side of our sheathing product we're getting two inches of closed cell foam from you guys it's an icing product that's roughly an r13 right right we're at uh i don't know which one of the icing they're using there's less and hr or anyway their this product is probably 7.2 7.1 to 7.2 but yeah right in that when you start talking phones and worrying about r factors it's that's not where i go with it and so that that's a good point actually the the way the r factor reads on this product is different than the way it reads say on a fiberglass bat because we were talking about air moving through this one right that air moving through is carrying temperature with it right this is at three inches there's almost no air moving through it there's almost no vapor moving through it yeah and an inch and a half on this closed cell product it is an air barrier okay uh so that the number is point zero zero yeah yeah it's it it is a really it is an air barrier product yep uh so now when you mention three inches the open cell uh is an air barrier at that any of these fibers products you'll never get there yeah uh and you could get there with board if the seams are true absolutely serious so we have the spray foam that was installed here and then we'll have a blown in place fiberglass product that will bring us almost to uh r35 and then we'll have another one inch on the outside i don't know if you can see the seam and i can't separate these products this product that's on the outside is a poly iso board but that product actually didn't come from our insulators it was installed by our framers because it comes adhered on the back of the zip sheeting that we're using so when we talk air barrier with these products i would say my air barrier is on the outside because we're using the the green zip sheathing and right there's one taped exactly so you're looking at there from here to the back side of my sheathing i'm already an r21 so while we have less than half by volume of the insulation that's going to go in this wall installed already we're already above code for our market which is an r19 r21 right so there's so there's what our wall assembly looks like and we talked about we have an r70 in the attic we actually use the cellulose product up there and the reason we went above that r60 is we had the space right like we're paying for windows from europe we're using spray foam down here we're having insulation under our slab this is a really well well-built home we're trying for energy efficiency that r10 costs virtually nothing in the grand scheme of things why not just up it a little bit and we're right we're doing our best best effort jake i wanted to expand on the part that you you know you've got this foam sheathing on the exterior so you can't see your stud cavities yeah from the exterior of the house with a infrared camera yep that that that is an important part of it where you've got all of those studs that you add them up and then you look at that house and you might have you might have an area that might be 15 feet long that you can actually see the studs through but with this product on the exterior that exterior insulation you don't have that heat loss so that's that's it that's a really good point actually when we talked our value about all these products we're not talking about r value once it's installed in the wall we're talking about the r value of this product this product doesn't make up but maybe 60 of the wall cavity correct the total wall assembly so we have 20 percent of our wall or 18 of our wall as our framing members and then another 20 or thereabouts traditionally in the united states is glazing or our windows or fenestration uh and when we look at our value of our studs we're in r1 per inch so this 2 8 stud is an r8 in a cavity where we're talking about having r35 in the cavity so we put that r6 on the outside as steve would say we're wearing a jacket right we're warming the entire assembly of our house that ability to put the insulation on the outside this well this is an r14 it's coupled next to a stud that's an r8 like we just talked about this is an r7 or r6 it still is that we get full r value of that so this is the best insulation that we have on the whole house in this assembly probably because we're getting the most bang for our buck out of that r value right we're not cutting down in our assembly at all correct so when we talk in our 13 wall r19 r45 it's not r45 in the end the whole thing it's it's our r45 worth of insulation in that wall the calculation is much less in reality but it's a really that's a really nebulous thing to chase around and say well the actual r value of this wall because there's more studs in this wall or there's more glass in that wall so when we talk about r value we're talking about the product and the r value of that product so that brings us to the one last point is the the exterior insulation i would say uh for the review of what these are that exterior insulation the more you can put out there in the cold climate the better you'll be because you're warming the entire house correct you get full r value out of it i just wanted to make sure that's a really clear really specific point that we want to make the only reason we go with the one inch foam for us it works really well with our structural requirements and we just haven't used any of the thicker zip r products yet so the other reason that you're here today i don't want you to think that this is just a commercial for these guys oh no they actually had a mistake when we talk about this product being manufactured on site there are things that can go wrong like we talked about and i wanted to show you guys the little mistake that we found upstairs and we'll talk about how we're going to fix it so let's cut let's go upstairs and let's talk about what happened all right so now we're upstairs this actually happens to be the master closet there's a north wall we know that the conditions were fine when they sprayed everything had been swept for dust nobody else was in the building nobody else had access uh temperatures were fine and so we we still had two little spots and we've inspected the whole house we do really feel like those are the only two spots and you can see on the surface it was hard on the back side when we pulled it now this foam has been here for a few months it still is a little spongy and soft and steve looked at it and knew right away what the issue was so do you want to walk us through what's going on well i think we've got a uh the cartridge that was in it uh evidently had a clog in one side of it and we just didn't get a good mix of chemical uh in that area or it would have it would have uh reacted just like the rest of this and the pieces that are over here anyway and have broken so it didn't completely cure so we didn't have a one-to-one mix of a side to b-side uh and that could have been caused just by the the uh the cartridge that's in there has holes on both sides of it if one of them was a little clogged it uh didn't have to drop the pressure on the machine and uh would have had an issue and so you know we talked about installation of fiberglass and the issues that you can have with that right getting it in place we talked about restrictions and temperature problems with cellulose if it's too cold the water in it will freeze it's just like any other product nobody's perfect no you need a good well-trained installer you need somebody that's paying attention you need somebody that caught that they had a clog and adjusted and on the surface it looked like it was fine we noticed a few weeks later there was a little bit of pulling and that's how we discovered this right right and i appreciate the fact that you know that nobody's perfect on it and we are back here to fix it uh and that's what that's what you have to do as a company that stands behind all their product and the cool thing about how you're going to fix it is we didn't bring the truck back correct we're actually going to use what's commonly referred to as a froth pack it's it looks like two little helium tanks or two propane tanks for your house a side and b side and might have a gun so let's let's do that now let's talk about how it's going to be it's going to operate let me go grab that and now that we've finished the repair upstairs i just wanted to say steve with g5 thanks for coming man that was that was awesome i appreciate it glad we could take care of that problem upstairs and now that we have talked about all these products i think the the again the take away they have their place they have their reason to be used you need to talk to your installer you need to look into what the manufacturer recommends but each one of these could be involved in just about any product or any any house it just depends on what your goal is so thanks for watching thanks for tuning in this is a lengthy video don't forget to follow me jake.brewton on instagram until next time on the build show steve and i all right thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: Aarow Building

Views: 24,431

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Id: H4jdKfZFsUE

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021