Insulation foremost to efficient building

Today, common Insulation creates moisture problems

We must adopt modern, efficient insulation materials.  Insulation material in Canada needs to be updated to effectively protect our homes and reduce our energy dependency.  Canada’s often-humid climate is characterized by high humidity throughout the year in places. The effect of this climate on buildings and residential housing in particular is significant.  Moisture drive is the main issue though the seasonal temperature range exceeds 40 degrees Celsius (80 degrees in places) and contributes to structural damage and energy consumption over the course of the year.

Canadian homes are almost all insulated with fiberglass insulation though recently other fibrous materials such as cellulose and mineral wool have made inroads to the market.  Insulation in Canada must provide protection from moisture drive as well as thermal protection because of our climate.  In Canada, insulation needs to perform as an air barrier and a vapor barrier.  While traditional walls are built with air barrier and vapor barrier layers to protect the fibrous insulation, these have resulted in costly damage on an enormous scale in Canada’s climate.  Either because of poor installation, failure to seal with caulking (in older homes), post installation penetrations placed in the wall by homeowners or failure of the sealants over time, this technique fails to stand up to the environment.

Modern insulation is more costly to install, but save far more money in time.

Insulation in Canada is cheap and readily available and most homeowners give it little thought because it is so widely accepted that insulation comes in plastic bags and is pink in color.  This ready acceptance needs to be challenged for in Canada, pink insulation is responsible for water damage from water ingress, vapor drive from the interior side of the wall and the resultant mold and mildew issues that this soon to be trapped water creates.

Spray Foam Insulation results in energy efficiency, and healthy indoor air quality.

Homeowners need spray foam insulation in Canada and need to familiarize themselves with its cost, benefits and limitations for no other product can withstand the high humidity of our climate.  Spray foam insulation in Canada provides an air barrier/vapor barrier and thermal insulation in a single application.  Spray Foam insulation is made of billions of tiny plastic wrapped bubbles which are not subject to air movement or moisture drive, making it the very best insulation material for Canada cold climate on the market.  While more expensive to install, spray foam insulation results in lower utility bills, less structural damage over the life of the building, longer building life and a far lower overall ownership costs than fibrous products.  Be sure to ask how EcoLogicfoam insulation can meet your needs.

Tags : air quality, air tight, benifits, building envelope, moisture, R-value, renovating, spray foam insulation, thermal insulation
Posted in : Common Questions, Environment, R-value, building envelope | 6 Comments »

Beautifully functional

All spray foam insulations certified for use in Canada come with a CCMC number.  When you seek a quote from a contractor ask him for the CCMC number of the product he intends to install.  With this information and the attached chart, you will know that the product is certified for use in residential homes in Canada. (Yes, there are companies who bring up cheap U.S. products and spray them for unsuspecting homeowners)

Spray Foam, a 3 in 1 product

When you buy spray foam insulation you are buying an air barrier, vapor barrier and thermal insulator in a single application and therefore it is valuable to start a comparison of the available products by looking for these numbers.  A quick look at the attached chart will outline some of the material properties of the various certified spray foams.

Spray Foam | Thermal Performance

The thermal performance of the spray foams can be found by looking at both the rows titled Foam Type and LTTR (Long term thermal resistance).  Type 2 foams are rated at a thermal resistance (R-value) of 6 per inch of depth, while type 1 foams are rated at an R-value of 5 per inch.  Polarfoam Soya and HeatLok Soya are the only Type 2 foams available in Canada.  Foam-lok, Certaspray and Walltite are all type 1 spray foams.  What this means is that if you are comparing quotes that discuss R-value, a type 1 installation of R20 is going to be 4 inches deep, while a type 2 installation of R20 need only be 3.33 inches to achieve the same performance.  Don’t be fooled by an apples to apples depth comparison.

The quality of certified Spray Foam products

The spray foam products compared here are all closed cell foams.  It is interesting to note under the row titled open cell content, just how high a percentage of open cell content some of these products have – between 7% and 8% for Foam-lok, certaspray and walltite!  This means that they will breathe more, are more susceptible to water absorption (shown near the bottom of the table) and explains the lower R-value of these products.

Vapor Permeance

Water vapor permeance is a related property with HeatLok soya and Polarfoam Soya outperforming the others.  This means that these products are less susceptible to vapor drive, form a stronger vapor barrier and protect your home better from rot, mold and mildew in our humid climates.

Flame spread ratings

The last property worth noting is the flame spread classification.  This is the materials propensity to support the spread of fire.  Once again, HeatLok and Polarfoam outperform all others and some significantly.

Choose the best for your home.

Disclaimer: EcoLogic Spray Foam installs Polarfoam Soya in Western Canada for our builder clients and residential homeowners.  We sought out the best spray foam product on the market, believe that we have it and think that you will too.  For more information and specific questions please contact us about our spray foam.

Tags : benifits, investment, renovating, spray foam insulation
Posted in : Common Questions, building envelope | 2 Comments »

Fiberglass – that fluffy, pink, insulation.

fiberglass

Home insulation.  It is pink, right? It comes in big oblong shaped bags and bursts out of them as they are opened – it is precut to fit into your walls perfectly and it has the claimed R-Value printed on the outside of the bag so you know what you are getting.  Home builders have been using it for decades now – it is fibergalss and is the standard, the norm and the dominant product on the market.

Fiberglass, it comes in loosely woven batts – cut to shape, made up of millions of tiny little strands of spun… glass!  No surprise there as it is in the name, but glass – isn’t that what our windows are made of – and aren’t windows a source of heat loss because glass conducts heat energy so well?  So why do we have it in our walls to keep our homes warm?  Oh ya, it is not the glass itself but the air that it traps in between the glass fibers that acts as an insulator.  Because that air is held in place and does not move, it maintains a different temperature than the air beside it.  But…  how does a fiber hold air in place?  It can’t.  So then air is not held in place, it is simply slowed in its movement.  That must be it right?

Is fiberglass effective?

But if air is simply slowed down, how is it an effective insulator if it can move from place to place?  Does it move, or is it simply that it can – I mean it is inside a wall, after all.

Air not only moves through fiberglass, it does so readily, quickly and systematically, acting in response to the laws of physics.  If you were to draw a wall (which is an assembly of different products) in profile, you would see that the majority of space in that wall (between the studs) is occupied by our fiberglass insulation batts.  On one side of the wall is our indoor room, and on the other is the outside world.  Our wall keeps them separate if it is doing its job.  Most of us know that warm air weighs less than cool air and thus tends to rise.  In Canada, in the winter time, our homes are generally kept at a comfortable 23 degrees celcius, while the outdoor environment can be anywhere from 0 degrees celcius in coastal areas to -40 degrees on the prairies.  The effect of this is that the air (loosely held in our fiberglass batt) that rests against the outside wall is cooler than the air that rests against the indoor wall.  Because of this the air against the outer wall tends to fall through the insulation and the air against the inside wall rises.  A convective current is formed and this is an effective heat transfer mechanism which moves heat energy from the inside wall to the outside wall and into the environment.  Fiberglass is a poor insulator.

Does fiberglass perform?

Further, while there is a vapor barrier in the form of a 6 mil polyethylene sheet on the inside of the wall which theoretically prevents air from moving into the wall, there is none on the exterior of the wall.  The result of this is that wind pressure can easily penetrate into the wall assembly and move through it.  As it does so it transfers heat in the air trapped in our insulation to the outdoors.  Fiberglass needs to be protected from air movement and this cannot be done on both sides of the wall.

Is fiberglass resilient?

What about the durability of fiberglass.  Those batts we install are not very rigid.  They are actually kind of floppy and need to be placed fairly carefully in order to get them to stay before we put up the vapor barrier.  What happens to them behind our walls over the years – do they stay in place, or settle.  Even worse, what happens if they get wet somehow – do they tend to sag and lose their insulating properties or leave areas of our walls uncovered and unprotected from the cold (and water damage).  Fiberglass is not durable.

Is fiberglass safe?

We haven’t even looked at the effect of having glass fibers in our homes.  Tiny glass fibers are not friendly to people.  If you think it’s a reasonable proposition that inhaling microscopic shards of glass coated with phenol-formaldehyde and urea-formaldehyde resins can cause disease, I’d say that we do not want fiberglass in our homes.  Fiberglass is not safe.

Spray foam replaces fiberglass – it does the job fiberglass fails to.

What we need is a product that is effective, durable, safe, and not suceptable to wind pressure, or moisture ingress.  While there are other insulating products on the market such as mineral wool, cellulose, even recycled blue jeans, Spray Foam Insulation stands alone in addressing each of these issues for it alone is not made of fibers, and is impervious to air and moisture flow.

Fiberglass days have passed.

Tags : air tight, benifits, building envelope, Cost, renovating, thermal insulation, Video
Posted in : Environment, Video, building envelope | 5 Comments »

Keep your cool with Spray Foam Insulation

Suffering in the heat?  Look to your roof.

As Canadians, we generally think in terms of staying warm through the winter. Many of us see insulation as a key to that, and of course it is. How many of you have had trouble sleeping this past week in the searing heat? With rooms that will not cool down because of the heat sink effect created by traditionally insulated attics that take hours to cool, now may be a great time to point out how much cooler an insulated foam roof can be.

Insulate your roof deck with foam.

Spray foam can be applied to the underside of the roof deck because it is applied as a liquid and formed in place – it bonds with the substrate and will never settle or sag. In an application like this we create what is called a closed roof assembly. Rather than spraying the floor of the attic and allowing the attic space to heat up during the day, foam is applied to the roof deck which serves to enclose the attic into the conditioned space below.

Benefits of foamed roof deck

The advantages to doing this are several. First, heat is stopped at the building envelope (the roof) and never allowed to enter the interior space. In so doing it does not have a chance to become trapped in the attic above your bedrooms in the evening. The second advantage is that by sealing the building envelope, moisture and condensation (a winter problem) are eliminated as issues during the heating season. While the volume of air that is conditioned by a home is increased with a closed roof assembly, efficiency increases because foam does not breath – there is no air movement through it like there is with fiberglass and similar products.

Lower cost roof installations at EcoLogicFoam

The result: Cool summer bedrooms, warm winter homes, improved air quality, an end to mold as a result of air reaching the condensation point inside attic spaces, lower energy bills and more comfortable, livable homes. In fact the only disadvantage is the cost. Like all premium building solutions,foam is not a cheap alternative, however, give us a call at EcoLogic for we have some innovative solutions that cost a fraction of what our competitors do without compromising the end result.

Call 1-888-880-8420 today to discuss your attic, roof, and insulation needs.

Tags : benifits, efficiency, energy efficient, renovating, spray foam insulation, thermal insulation
Posted in : Common Questions, Uncategorized | Comments Off

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What about our electrical wiring?

Foam wiring in place

We are often asked what happens if the wiring should ever need to be repaired, replaced or worked on after we spray.  We generally install foam in the same order as fiberous batts would be installed – after your plumbing and electrical inspections are complete.  Your wires are in the wall and spraying over them buries them.  Does this create a problem?  No.

First off, it is very rare that electrical wiring is ever changed after inspection.

If it should need to be worked on, it is very easy to run a new wire in between the foam and the drywall because the foam is rigid.  Should the original wire need to be accessed after it has been foamed, our Soya based foam is very easy to cut into with a knife, making it easy to access.

The foam itself does not interact or negatively impact electrical wires in any way, and has undergone testing at the Canadian Construction Materials Center to ensure this.

On occasion, we have been asked to instal foam prior to electrical wiring and this can be done because in a 2×6 wall cavity, we generally install 3″ – 3.5″ in depth allowing for the electrical chases to be run in front of the foamed wall.  This ensures that the foam does not bury the wires and allows them to move freely in front of and apart from the foam itself.  Check with your building code official if this is something that you would like to do to ensure that they are happy with this solution.

Tags : Electrical, Questions, renovating, spray foam insulation, Wiring
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So many homes in Vancouver, Burnaby or the Fraser Valley have little to no insulation in their walls.  These homes are drafty, cold and inefficient.  Until now there has been no way of improving the insulation value of these houses without a major, costly, and disruptive renovation.

Now you can improve your homes comfort, lower its heating bills, eliminate sound transmission and improve the air quality in your home with EcoLogics pour foam wall product.  This material is installed through small holes drilled into walls through which we access the wall cavity behind your drywall or lathe and plaster.  The foam is specially formulated to rise slowly allowing the material to reach the bottom of the cavity before expanding to fill the entire wall.

The result is a perfectly insulated wall.  The foam will never settle, will never sag and will provide the highest R value possible for the available wall thickness.  In most cases this will result in a true R14 (in a 2×4 wall) which will be unaffected by pressure or temperature gradients as fiberglass is.

The process is  efficient because the holes through which we install the material are small enough to be plugged when finished.  While a new coat of paint is recommended, major costly work is avoided, and we can be finished in a single day.  The difference in performance will be felt immediately.

We will post additional information on our website about this amazing product in the coming weeks.  In the mean time, send your questions in the comments below or contact us directly  for details.

We insulate Older homes without major renovations

Tags : existing walls, new product, Pour foam, R-value, renovating
Posted in : Pour in place Foam | 3 Comments »