Sunday, January 8, 2017

Spray Foam Insulation


When building (and reading about building) a house, there seem to be two main things that are always listed as the two most important parts of the building process---windows and insulation. After a lot of research, we decided to go with a method called "flash and batt" for our insulation in our Cooper Cottage. Flash and batt insulation is where they go through the house and spray closed cell foam everywhere that you would normally put insulation. Then, they cover the spray foam with a layer of conventional R13/19/23 batt.  

I discovered that spray foam is still a controversial topic. I ran across a lot different opinions when researching it on the Internet and taking to builders.  Because of the mixed reviews, I really did my homework on this one.  Everyone honestly had different feelings about it, both for and against.  Builders and home owners either seem to love it or hate it. Here are some pros and cons that we would like to share with those also curious about the spray foam process:


*Saves you money on your energy bills
*Spray foam is strong and will make your house stronger
*Does not allow water and moisture infiltration
*Helps reduce dust and pollen infliltration


  
*Spray foam MUST be installed properly. 
*Some have reported that air leaks have caused wood to rot
*More expensive



The installers sprayed a cardboard box before the walls to set their spray gun and once dry, I could jump up and down on this box and it would not budge.  Multiple YouTube videos also show how much force it takes to pull boards apart when sprayed with closed cell foam.  This foam has made our house extremely strong. With our house built on a hill, we get a lot of wind. We have stood in the house during heavy wind and can barely hear it thanks to the spray foam. 

This is our master bath, and you can see how it covered around the water pipes.
In the upstairs bedroom, you may be able to notice that there is part of the roof line that will be  part of the ceiling in the bedrooms. In these areas, we used open cell foam in order to get the most insulation possible against that black metal roof!



If it was a wood area, I had them spray it.  This was to help with any small holes that may have been left from the framing stage. 
Here you can see them putting in the "batt" part after the spray foam, they used different levels of R-value insulation depending on where it was going in the house. 

Here is the open cell foam I mentioned earlier.  


At the end of the day, we are really happy with how it turned out!

-David