Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation
Sydney, Nova Scotia ยท across Cape Breton Island
We provide spray foam insulation for attics, foundations, crawl spaces, garages and new construction. · You get one fixed written price, set before we start.
Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation provides attic insulation, basement insulation and crawl space insulation to homes across Cape Breton Island. The company also handles garages, new construction and insulation removal and replacement, and every job comes with one fixed number in writing before anything starts.
Spray foam insulation insulates and stops air movement at the same time, in the same pass. The second part is what people underestimate. An R-value on a package is measured in still air, and very little of the air in a Cape Breton house is still.
We insulate attics, foundation walls, crawl spaces, garages, new framing, and tired insulation that needs removal and replacement before anything better can go in. Every spray foam insulation price begins with somebody standing in the space with a tape measure.
Tell us the kind of space, an approximate size, and the symptom. Someone comes out and sees it. Or call +1 902-201-3017.
Spray foam insulation is the whole business. The insulation is manufactured on site and the result depends entirely on the person holding the gun, so what decides a spray foam insulation job is the part nobody sees: ratio, substrate temperature and applied depth, checked as the work goes on.
One price, written down. We measure, decide the depth of spray foam insulation the assembly actually requires, and hand you a fixed figure. Nothing grows between the quote and the invoice.
Honest scoping. Sometimes the right advice is to fix the roof before any insulation goes in, or to spray foam the band joists this year and leave the basement insulation until next. You will hear that before you spend, not after.
Records kept as we go. Surface temperature, conditions, insulation lot and applied depth are logged through the job. That log is the difference between a spray foam insulation installation and somebody just spraying, and it is what answers any question that comes up in five years.
The space is left clean, the insulation trimmed flush, and the room ready for whatever comes next. More on how the company operates is on the about page.
Each area gets spray foam insulation specified against its own conditions rather than against a standard insulation depth.
More heat leaves through the top of a house than through any other single surface, which is why attic insulation is the cheapest spray foam insulation you can buy. Warm air rises, finds the openings around fixtures, hatches, plumbing stacks and wall plates, and departs.
View Attic Insulation
Three separate problems meet in a basement, and ordinary insulation solves none of them. The wall touches wet ground, masonry moves heat readily, and the joint where framing lands on the foundation leaks air right around the building.
View Basement Insulation
Everything true of a foundation wall is true here, only on your elbows. Too little headroom, bare ground beneath, a difficult way in, and all of it directly under a floor people walk on.
View Crawl Space Insulation
The garage is the space people most want to be warmer and least often have treated properly. It is also the space whose insulation decides the comfort of a room you are already paying to heat, because whatever sits above it shares a floor with it.
View Garage Insulation
A building still open is the one chance to get the envelope right with everything reachable and nothing to dismantle first. The air barrier can be continuous by design instead of assembled from patches.
View New Construction Insulation
Two spray foam insulation products share the name and they are not substitutes for one another. Getting that choice right is most of what separates a lasting insulation job from an expensive lesson.
View Closed Cell and Open Cell Spray Foam
Some insulation has to leave before anything else can begin. That includes saturated batts, contaminated loose fill, material rodents have been through, and spray foam insulation that went on badly the first time.
View Insulation Removal and ReplacementSpray foam insulation handles insulation and air sealing in one product, so there is no separate air barrier to detail, tape and hope somebody got right.
More resistance in less depth. Closed cell spray foam insulation reaches R-6 through R-7 per inch when new and settles near R-6.5, which is what counts when a cavity is shallow and cannot be deepened.
The insulation is bonded in place, so it does not slump, settle or leave a gap opening at the top of a bay ten years later.
At sufficient depth, closed cell spray foam insulation controls vapour by itself. One layer of insulation, two functions, no polyethylene to install and puncture.
Nothing in the insulation feeds a mouse and nothing in it compresses into a tunnel.
Closed cell spray foam insulation measurably stiffens the assembly it goes into, which no batt insulation has ever done.
Describe what you are dealing with. We will name the insulation that belongs there, and say so plainly when the cheaper one is correct.
Fibreglass slows heat down. It does nothing to stop air passing straight through it, and that single difference is why spray foam insulation behaves so differently in a real building.
Push a batt into a bay and the insulation still leaves gaps at the edges, gaps where the wiring runs, and a hole around every box and pipe. Air finds all of them.
Spray foam insulation arrives as a liquid and swells. It takes hold of the stud, the sheathing and the awkward triangle in the corner that no batt was ever cut to fit. Nothing is left for air to travel along, because nothing is left.
Two houses can carry the same number on paper and behave nothing alike. The difference is whether the insulation is continuous or merely present.
Stopping the air also stops most of the moisture. Water gets into walls and roofs mainly by riding along with moving air, not by soaking through solid insulation, which is the second reason spray foam insulation outperforms its label number.
One question settles it almost every time: does this assembly need the insulation itself to control vapour?
Where the answer is yes, the insulation is closed cell. Foundation walls, ground contact, band joists, floors over vented space, roof decks.
Where the answer is no, open cell spray foam insulation is lighter on the budget, reaches further into deep and irregular cavities, and absorbs sound far better.
A typical house wants each of them somewhere. We specify the insulation area by area rather than picking one and using it everywhere. More on how we choose between the two is on the closed cell and open cell spray foam page.
There are two honest ways to put spray foam insulation into a roof, and they lead to different buildings.
Keep the attic cold and vented, seal the ceiling below it, and lay the insulation over the top. That suits a simple roof with nothing mechanical stored up there.
Or put spray foam insulation straight under the sheathing and up the gables, shut the vents, and what was an attic is now simply more house. Choose that where ductwork sits above the ceiling, where dormers and valleys chop the roof into sections, or where ice returns to the overhang every winter.
Which of the two spray foam insulation approaches suits your roof is decided after looking, not before.
A basement wall is cold, damp and leaky along its top edge, all at once, which is why basement insulation is the most common spray foam insulation job in the province. Closed cell sprayed onto the concrete addresses all three without a stud wall pressing absorbent material against a wet surface.
Under a crawl space the same reasoning applies with far less room to work in. Spray foam insulation seals the perimeter walls, carries across the band above, and goes on over a taped ground sheet laid first. The space then runs at close to the temperature and humidity of the rooms above it.
Anything under the floor you walk on ends up in the air you breathe, because air in a house travels upward. A crawl space is not a separate building, and insulation down there is doing the same work as insulation anywhere else in the house.
Where the foundation stops, a band of framing runs the whole way round carrying the floor structure. It is thin, it faces the weather directly, and nine times out of ten the insulation in front of it is a scrap of fibreglass and nothing more.
It is a small area, but it carries a very large share of the total leakage in the building.
Two or three inches of closed cell spray foam insulation around that band is a short piece of work at a modest price, and it is the insulation job people notice within a day, because the floor above stops feeling cold underfoot.
Where a budget only covers one insulation job this year, the rim joist is normally where the spray foam insulation should go.
Put a bedroom or a bonus room above a garage and its floor has weather on three sides of it. Fibreglass insulation in that cavity accomplishes very little, because air moves around it freely from every direction.
Filling that cavity with closed cell spray foam insulation seals it and insulates it in one operation. The change in that room is immediate, and it is the single most obvious improvement spray foam insulation makes to most houses.
The same insulation approach applies to a floor that overhangs the wall below it, or a room built over an open porch.
A new construction build in progress is the only time every cavity is reachable for spray foam insulation and nothing has to be dismantled first. The air barrier can be genuinely continuous rather than stitched together from patches.
The same logic applies to a renovation that has already stripped a wall back to the framing. While the cavity is open, spray foam insulation is cheap to do properly.
We work to a builder's schedule, bringing the spray foam insulation in after the mechanical and electrical rough-in and handing the space to the drywallers with the insulation trimmed flat.
Sydney runs an average wind of roughly thirty kilometres an hour through January, and the island has open Atlantic on every side of it. That changes what spray foam insulation is being asked to do here. That does something specific to insulation that almost no quote mentions.
Outside air enters at the soffit and moves through and around loose fill and batts, worst of all at the overhang where the insulation is already at its thinnest. The industry term is wind washing. The insulation has not gone anywhere. It has simply stopped earning its keep.
On a frosty morning you can read it off the roof: a melted strip along the bottom edge while the middle stays white.
Air cannot travel through spray foam insulation, so the problem does not arise. Applied under the sheathing there is no vented attic for wind to enter in the first place. Where a vented attic is the right approach, we baffle every rafter bay and seal the overhang so incoming air stays in the channel it belongs in.
The structural side of spray foam insulation has been measured. Testing at the NAHB Research Center found three inches of closed cell took a vinyl clad wood stud wall from 913 pounds of racking resistance to 2,800. On a plywood clad wall the figure went from 2,890 pounds to 5,300.
Roof decks respond the same way. University of Florida work to ASTM E 330 recorded a three inch fill taking uplift resistance from around 75 pounds per square foot to roughly 250.
Anyone who watched sheathing leave a roof during Fiona in September 2022 will see why that is worth knowing. It is not a reason to insulate on its own. It arrives with the job regardless.
Spray foam insulation cannot be left showing in a room people use. A rated thermal barrier has to go over the top, which on almost every job means gypsum board at half an inch.
Somewhere nobody lives, up in a roof space or down under a floor, a thinner tested ignition barrier over the insulation will often satisfy it instead.
This is where cheap spray foam insulation quotes hide. If a basement figure looks surprisingly low, ask whether board and finishing over the insulation are inside it. We tell you which covering rule applies to your space while it can still change your decision.
Nova Scotia sits in climate zone 6, and Part 9 residential work moved to a Tier 2 requirement for permits received from 1 April 2026 onward. It works on points rather than a fixed list of numbers, and a project needs ten of them.
Airtightness carries real weight in that scoring, and it is the part of the score insulation choice decides. Bringing a house under 2.0 air changes an hour earns 3.5 points by itself, verified by a blower door test once the insulation, the sealing and the windows and doors are finished.
That is why the spray foam insulation product choice belongs in the conversation early. Spray foam insulation is an air barrier the moment it is installed, so it does a large share of that particular work in one trade. Foundation assemblies in the guidance run to effective R-18, R-20 and R-22, and the weakest run of insulation is the section that counts.
A room over a garage or a crawl space that stays cold no matter where the thermostat sits is almost always showing an insulation problem rather than a heating one.
Ice forms along the overhang every winter, then a stain appears on the ceiling underneath.
Cold air moves across the floor where it meets an outside wall, past insulation that is no longer sealing anything.
Fuel use climbs faster than price increases account for, and that is what failed insulation costs every month. Around a third of homes in this province still burn oil, so the arithmetic bites harder here than in most of Canada.
A basement smells in August, or dark patches spread in the corners.
Frost or damp forms on the underside of the sheathing, visible in the attic in February, above insulation that is letting house air straight through it.
Spray foam insulation is sold by the board foot, meaning a square foot of surface at one inch of depth. Installed, closed cell typically lands between $1.50 and $3.50 a board foot. Open cell lands between $0.80 and $1.50.
So depth matters at least as much as area, and the depth of insulation is set by what the assembly has to achieve rather than by a default figure.
The rest of the variation comes from preparation: whether old insulation has to be removed, how bad the access is, how high the ceiling is, and whether a covering over the insulation has to follow.
Efficiency Nova Scotia operates a Home Energy Assessment, and HomeWarming for households that qualify on income. Both change from year to year, so we point you at the current terms rather than printing a number that goes stale.
We pay attention to how other independent spray foam crews handle the seasonal and substrate challenges specific to their own regions, since the same chemistry behaves differently depending on where the truck parks. Spray foam insulation in Chatham works a much milder, Lake Erie-moderated version of the freeze-thaw cycle than Cape Breton's coastal Atlantic winters bring, while insulation services contractors in Grimsby deal with Niagara Escarpment drainage quirks that don't have a real equivalent on this island. Further inland, Leamington attic insulation specialists handle a longer, more humid growing season that changes crawl-space treatment timelines, and spray foam contractors services in Milton work a drier inland climate with a shorter, sharper heating-season rush. None of it changes the underlying product, but it's a reminder that a generic quote rarely accounts for what the local coastline and climate are actually doing.
We walk the space, measure it, take the surface temperature and identify whatever has to be sorted out before any insulation goes in. A leak gets repaired first.
You receive a written spray foam insulation specification: product, depth, which areas, what covering follows, and the price.
Masking goes up on the morning, and anything not meant to receive spray foam insulation gets covered.
Spray foam insulation is applied in measured lifts rather than in one thick pass, so it cures correctly and reaches full depth without overheating.
The insulation is cut back flush to the framing so board sits flat against it.
The building is mechanically ventilated, and you have the manufacturer's re-entry window in writing beforehand. Nobody goes back in early.
We walk the finished insulation with you, hand over the job log, and take the offcuts with us.
Across the Cape Breton Regional Municipality: Sydney, Sydney River, Westmount, Coxheath and Howie Centre. Glace Bay, Dominion, Reserve Mines and Donkin. North Sydney, Sydney Mines and New Waterford. Louisbourg, Port Morien and out along the Mira.
Past the municipal boundary we install spray foam insulation in Baddeck, Inverness and Port Hawkesbury.
A large share of the housing here went up around the collieries between the 1900s and the 1950s. These houses often have shallow framing, stone or block foundations, and stud bays that run uninterrupted from the cellar to the roof. Those houses take extremely well to spray foam insulation, and they want somebody who has opened one up before. Check your area or reach out through the contact page.
You get one visit, one insulation specification, and one figure that does not move. Call +1 902-201-3017.
Ask whether the spray foam insulation itself has to hold vapour back. At enough depth closed cell spray foam insulation does, which is why it goes anywhere water is part of the picture: foundation walls, crawl spaces, band joists, ground contact, roof decks. Open cell insulation never does, at any depth. What open cell offers instead is lower cost per board foot, much greater expansion into deep or oddly shaped voids, and considerably better sound absorption, which makes it the right insulation for interior partitions and between floors. A typical house ends up carrying each of them somewhere. If somebody has quoted open cell against a foundation, ask them where the vapour control is coming from.
In any room people occupy, yes. A thermal barrier is required over the spray foam insulation and half inch gypsum board is the assembly normally accepted for it. Somewhere nobody lives, up in a roof space or under a floor, a thinner tested ignition barrier will usually do instead. This matters to the budget rather than to the spray foam insulation, because a finished basement means boarding on top of the insulation. You will know which rule applies to your space before you commit to anything.
For the application and for the re-entry window after it. How long that window runs is set by the spray foam insulation manufacturer, and it varies with the formulation and with how well the building clears. It reaches you in writing beforehand, never as news on the morning. Most houses are a single day of spray foam insulation work with a re-entry period measured in hours, and we ventilate mechanically to reach it. If anybody suggests you can stay in the room while spray foam insulation is going on, walk away.
Because it went on off ratio. Two chemicals meet at the gun in an exact proportion at a controlled temperature, and if that proportion is wrong the insulation never fully cures. It holds a chemical odour, it can shrink back from the framing and reopen the very air path the work was meant to close, and it can end up crumbly or oddly coloured. A smell lingering weeks later is the clearest indicator. Applying fresh spray foam insulation over it fixes nothing. It has to come off mechanically, back to clean framing, and be redone. That is regular work for us.
Yes, once the surface has been checked. Spray foam insulation has a minimum substrate temperature, and going on below it produces exactly the shrinkage and bond failures everyone is trying to avoid. So we read the surface rather than the air, and bring heat in before the insulation goes on when the reading calls for it. Cold attic insulation and unheated garages are ordinary winter jobs here. What we will not do is spray a cold deck and hope for the best, which is where a great deal of failed spray foam insulation originates.
Tell us what it is, roughly how big, whether it is heated at the moment, and what the insulation in it is doing wrong. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 902-201-3017.
