Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation
Sydney, Nova Scotia ยท across Cape Breton Island
Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation is a spray foam contractor working across the island. Certified crew, work installed to the CAN/ULC S705.2 standard, and one fixed number in writing before anything starts.
Foam insulates and it stops air movement, and it does both 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.
Attics, foundation walls, crawl spaces, garages, new framing, and tired material that has to be stripped out before anything better can go in. Every price begins with somebody standing in the space with a tape measure.
The kind of space, an approximate size, and the symptom. Someone comes out and sees it. Or call +1 902-201-3017.
Certified installation. Foam is mixed on site and the result depends entirely on the person holding the gun. Our installers hold current certification, the material meets CAN/ULC S705.1 and the installation meets CAN/ULC S705.2.
One price, written down. We measure, decide the depth 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 first, or to do the band joists this year and leave the basement until next. You will hear that before you spend, not after.
Records kept as we go. Surface temperature, conditions, product lot and applied depth are logged through the job. That log is the difference between an installation and somebody just spraying, and it is what answers any question that comes up in five years.
The space is left clean, trimmed flush and ready for whatever comes next.
Each area is specified against its own conditions rather than against a standard depth.
More heat leaves through the top of a house than through any other single surface, and the top of a house is also the cheapest place to intervene. 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. 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 products share the name and they are not substitutes for one another. Getting that choice right is most of what separates a lasting installation from an expensive lesson.
View Closed Cell and Open Cell Spray Foam
Some insulation has to leave before anything else can begin. Saturated batts, contaminated loose fill, material rodents have been through, and foam that went on badly the first time.
View Insulation Removal and ReplacementOne product handles insulation and air sealing together, so there is no separate air barrier to detail, tape and hope somebody got right.
More resistance in less depth. Closed cell 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.
It is bonded, 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 controls vapour by itself. One material, two functions, no polyethylene to install and puncture.
Nothing in it feeds a mouse and nothing in it compresses into a tunnel.
Closed cell measurably stiffens the assembly it goes into, which no batt product has ever done.
Describe what you are dealing with. We will name the product 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.
Push a batt into a bay and you still have gaps at the edges, gaps where the wiring runs, and a hole around every box and pipe. Air finds all of them.
Foam 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 material.
One question settles it almost every time: does this assembly need the insulation itself to control vapour?
Where the answer is yes, it is closed cell. Foundation walls, ground contact, band joists, floors over vented space, roof decks.
Where the answer is no, open cell 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 area by area rather than picking one product and using it everywhere.
There are two honest ways to treat a roof and they lead to different buildings.
Keep the attic cold and vented, and put the effort into sealing the ceiling below it before insulating over the top. That suits a simple roof with nothing mechanical stored up there.
Or put foam 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.
We decide which after looking, not before.
A basement wall is cold, damp and leaky along its top edge, all at once. 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. Seal the perimeter walls, carry it across the band above, and lay a taped sheet over the ground 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.
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 it has a scrap of fibreglass wedged in front of it and nothing more.
Small area. Very large share of the total leakage in the building.
Two or three inches of closed cell around that band is a short piece of work at a modest price, and it is the one people notice within a day, because the floor above stops feeling cold underfoot.
Where a budget only covers one item this year, this is normally where it should go.
Put a bedroom or a bonus room above a garage and its floor has weather on three sides of it. Fibreglass in that cavity accomplishes very little, because air moves around it freely from every direction.
Filling that cavity with closed cell seals it and insulates it together. The change in that room is immediate and it is the single most obvious improvement most houses have available.
The same applies to a floor that overhangs the wall below it, or a room built over an open porch.
A build in progress is the only time every cavity is reachable 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 it is open, it is cheap to do properly.
We work to a builder's programme, slotting in after the mechanical and electrical rough-in and handing the space to the drywallers 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 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 material 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 foam, 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.
This part 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.
Foam 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 will often satisfy it instead.
This is where cheap quotes hide. If a basement figure looks surprisingly low, ask whether board and finishing are inside it. We tell you which 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. Bringing a house under 2.0 air changes an hour earns 3.5 points by itself, verified by a blower door test once sealing and the windows and doors are finished.
That is why product choice belongs in the conversation early. Foam 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 section is the one that counts.
A room over a garage or a crawl space that stays cold no matter where the thermostat sits.
Ice forming along the overhang every winter, then a stain appearing on the ceiling underneath.
Air moving across your feet where the floor meets an outside wall.
Fuel use climbing faster than the price increases account for. Around a third of homes in this province still burn oil, so the arithmetic bites harder here than in most of Canada.
A basement that smells in August, or dark patches spreading in the corners.
Frost or damp on the underside of the sheathing when you look into the attic in February.
Foam 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 depth 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 material has to be removed, how bad the access is, how high the ceiling is, and whether a covering 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 walk it, measure it, take the surface temperature and identify whatever has to be sorted out first. A leak gets repaired first.
You receive a written specification: product, depth, which areas, what covering follows, and the price.
Masking goes up on the morning, and anything not meant to receive foam gets covered.
Foam is applied in measured lifts rather than in one thick pass, so it cures correctly and reaches full depth without overheating.
It 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 it 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 work Baddeck, Inverness and Port Hawkesbury.
A large share of the housing here went up around the collieries between the 1900s and the 1950s. Shallow framing, stone or block foundations, and stud bays that run uninterrupted from the cellar to the roof. Those houses take extremely well to foam, and they want somebody who has opened one up before.
One visit, one specification, one figure that does not move. Call +1 902-201-3017.
Ask whether the insulation itself has to hold vapour back. At enough depth closed cell 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 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 right 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 foam 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 foam, 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 manufacturer of the product, and it varies with the material 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 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 foam 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 material 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. Spraying fresh foam 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. Foam 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 when the reading calls for it. Cold attics 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 foam originates.
What it is, roughly how big, whether it is heated at the moment, and what is going wrong. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 902-201-3017.
