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.
Laying more loose fill insulation over those openings does not close them. It insulates them.
Call +1 902-201-3017 and we will get up there and see what the existing attic insulation is actually doing.
The first approach leaves the attic vented and cold. Every penetration through the ceiling below is sealed, then the spray foam insulation goes over the top. It suits a straightforward roof with nothing mechanical stored above the ceiling.
The second folds the roof space into the warm building. Spray foam insulation goes beneath the sheathing and up the gable ends, and the venting is shut off.
Go warm where ducting or an air handler lives above the ceiling, where dormers and valleys chop the roof into sections, where knee wall space hides behind a finished room, or where ice returns to the overhang year after year.
Which of the two spray foam insulation approaches your roof wants is a decision made after somebody has been inside it.
There is a failure that shows up hard on exposed sites. Outside air enters at the soffit and works through and around loose fill and batts, worst of all at the overhang, where the insulation tapers to almost nothing.
Wind washing is the term. The insulation is still sitting where it was installed, but it is no longer doing much, and it is the failure spray foam insulation was designed out of.
Spray foam insulation is not vulnerable to it, because air cannot travel through the insulation. Applied under the sheathing, there is no vented attic for wind to reach. Where a cold attic is the correct approach, we baffle each rafter bay and seal the overhang so incoming air stays in its channel.
Ice at the edge of a roof is not a drainage fault, it is an insulation fault. Warm air escaping past the insulation into the attic melts snow higher up, the meltwater runs down onto the unheated overhang and freezes there, the ridge of ice grows, and water starts backing up beneath the shingles.
Piling on more insulation does not always cure it, because the mechanism is escaping air rather than conducted heat. Sealing the ceiling below, or shifting the spray foam insulation up to the sheathing, removes the heat that starts it.
Ice in the same place two winters running is worth investigating properly, and it usually ends at the insulation.
Closed cell spray foam insulation delivers roughly R-6 to R-7 an inch, easing toward R-6.5 with age. Open cell insulation delivers roughly R-3.5 to R-3.8. More on how we choose between the two products is on the closed cell and open cell spray foam page.
This province sits in climate zone 6, and current residential targets are demanding, so the insulation depth follows from the target and the space available rather than from a figure chosen in advance.
We will not give you an assembly resistance figure without telling you the depth it assumes. If anyone else does, that is worth questioning.
We go up, measure the insulation already in place, and inspect the sheathing above for damp before any spray foam insulation figure is discussed. For the full range of services we provide, see the Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation home page.
Call +1 902-201-3017 and we will find a time.
Cape Breton Spray Foam Insulation covers attics, foundations, crawl spaces, garages and new builds right across the island.
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 ReplacementArrange a spray foam insulation visit. We take measurements, read the substrate, and put an insulation price on paper that will not shift.
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.
