BuildingWell Episode 8 Transcript

00:00:00

Music plays

00:00:05 Kevin Collins

It’s basically plastic, so it’s an insulating material made of polyurethane, which is kind of plastic. It’s kind of a wide catchall, I guess chemical generally, it’s packaged as liquids and then when installed, a chemical reaction causes it to expand in place after it’s sprayed so it can expand into cavities.

00:00:21 Kevin Collins

And be useful in that way.

00:00:25 Michelle Moran

Welcome to BuildingWell, Sustainable Homes, Equitable Communities, your new podcast from New Ecology. Join us as we explore real life stories from key players in green building and community development. We’ll examine exciting new innovations, highlighting practical solutions for creating more affordable, healthier, more resilient, equitable communities we’re building well, together.

00:00:50 Molly Craft

This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.

00:00:59 Alina Michelewicz

Welcome to the BuildingWell podcast. I’m your host, Alina Michelewicz, and this is my co-host Michelle Moran.

00:01:06 Michelle Moran

Hello.

00:01:07 Alina Michelewicz

Today we have Kevin Collins, Project Manager at New Ecology here to talk about spray foam insulation. Now, I have to thank Kevin for agreeing to come on this episode without a chance to prepare answers to all my many thousands of questions about.

00:01:19 Alina Michelewicz

Spray Foam insulation. I have thoughts. I have concerns. So without further ado, let’s get into it on spray foam insulation.

00:01:28 Alina Michelewicz

So welcome, Kevin.

00:01:30 Kevin Collins

Thank you. Great.

00:01:30 Kevin Collins

To be here.

00:01:31 Alina Michelewicz

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you.

00:01:33 Alina Michelewicz

Do at New Ecology.

00:01:34 Kevin Collins

Sure, I’m a project manager here at New Ecology, I’ve been here for about 3 years and professionally I do project management of green certifications such as Passive House lead, enterprise green communities, Energy Star and a few others, as well as provide Technical Support for energy code and municipal sustainability requirements. Work on these projects from design.

00:01:54 Kevin Collins

Through building completion, I do some building inspections on behalf of LEED, and then we also provide some technical consulting as part of other company offerings.

00:02:03 Alina Michelewicz

Cool. How does spray foam insulation play into these projects? Like how is it related?

00:02:07 Kevin Collins

Sure. Yeah. So I will, I will say as a disclaimer, I’m by no means an expert in spray foam, but I used to install it when I worked as a contractor and I know a decent deal about it from current work. But if there’s any comments as a result of this podcast, I would definitely love to hear them and learn more. Spray foam is in many, if not most.

00:02:24 Kevin Collins

Of our projects, it’s much more common in rehabilitation projects due to limiting conditions that can’t be.

00:02:30 Kevin Collins

Designed around, you’re inheriting a building with sometimes unique features and you have to make these spaces do many things at the same time. Control for water and moisture, thermal performance, comfort, sound, etcetera. But we do see spray foam in new construction. Similarly for some tricky details.

00:02:46 Alina Michelewicz

What are the other kinds of insulation?

00:02:49 Alina Michelewicz

Other than spray foam and also what kinds of spray foam insulation are there?

00:02:53 Kevin Collins

Sure. Yeah. So there’s a lot of different varieties of insulation. I think you can go back hundreds of years and see that people were trying to fill the cavities of their walls with any kind of materials they could think of.

00:03:06 Kevin Collins

Log cabins and stuff and mud between them. Between the logs you can go back somewhere within the last 100 years and find people putting ripped up blue jeans, newspapers in walls. So we’ve always been trying to find things to make our houses warmer.

00:03:21 Kevin Collins

So presently spray foam is one of many materials we typically see. Foam materials such as spray foam or rigid foam material. Cellulose, which is actually a recycled newspaper. Fiberglass, which is kind of like a spun glass, as the name implies. And then we also see mineral wool, which is similar to fiberglass.

00:03:40 Michelle Moran

So not much seaweed insulation.

00:03:42 Michelle Moran

Around anymore.

00:03:44 Kevin Collins

I don’t see it personally. Maybe there is some product offerings out there, but if it works, it works.

00:03:48 Alina Michelewicz

Could you talk a little bit about, like open cells, spray foam versus closed

00:03:52 Alina Michelewicz

Cell what does that mean?

00:03:53 Kevin Collins

Sure. Yeah. So I guess there are probably many different varieties of spray foam and to keep a high level, as you say, there’s open cell and closed cell. So the main drivers you’ll hear in the industry relate to.

00:04:04 Kevin Collins

R value and cost.

00:04:06 Kevin Collins

Closed cell has a higher R value or insulating value per inch, but it costs more whereas open cell is kind of the opposite, it has a lower insulating value per inch, but it’s less expensive. So if you’re designing a building assembly and you are limited on space, it might kind of be a costing analysis to which one you use what is not considered enough.

00:04:25 Kevin Collins

And can lead to problems. Is the vapor permeance of each product. Water vapor can move through materials, and that makes sense, right? When we think of something like fiberglass, which you can poke a finger through, we’ve all seen a fiberglass batt. So certainly water moisture vapor. Those can also move through a material with foam. It’s not so easy.

00:04:44 Kevin Collins

You might be able to breakthrough if you poke it hard enough, but in its cured state it’s obviously much more rigid and moisture, especially vapor, can have a tough time getting through that as well. So why does this matter? Open cell is more vapor open and closed. Cell foam is more vapor closed, meaning vapor can’t travel through closed cell foam as well.

00:04:58 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:05:04 Kevin Collins

So when you think of other things that are vapor closed or maybe even waterproof like metal or rubber or plastic, now think of a wall. Any exterior wall, for example in your house, if you wrap the outside of your house in a big yellow rubber rain jacket.

00:05:18 Kevin Collins

Get and you said this is great. My house is going to stay dry, but we need to be warm as well. And then you spray a foam on the inside of your walls between these two layers or things like your wood framing. Maybe your plywood sheathing. So on rainy days you might still find some water in your rain jacket especially.

00:05:33 Kevin Collins

If.

00:05:33 Kevin Collins

It’s really nasty outside and windy. You have that wind driven rain or we’re getting a Nor’ Eater up.

00:05:38 Kevin Collins

Here.

00:05:39 Kevin Collins

So in the Wall House example, if water came into this wall design and got the wood wet, it’s going to be very hard for it to dry out because you aren’t able to unzip that rain jacket.

00:05:48 Alina Michelewicz

Mmmm.

00:05:48 Kevin Collins

And you, you know, toss your shirt or wood framing.

00:05:51 Kevin Collins

In the dryer.

00:05:52 Kevin Collins

So imagine in that situation, relying on your own body heat and any like convective air movement, you can find to dry out your wet shirt inside a rain jacket. That’d be really uncomfortable and kind of take a long time and be.

00:06:03 Kevin Collins

Hard to do.

00:06:04 Michelle Moran

Yeah.

00:06:06 Michelle Moran

Wow, what a good analogy.

00:06:08 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:06:08 Alina Michelewicz

That’s great. I’ve definitely been hiking in a sweater and a rain jacket and the sweat.

00:06:13 Alina Michelewicz

But you know, get some of the sweater. You.

00:06:15 Alina Michelewicz

Can cut that out.

00:06:17 Kevin Collins

That’s accurate because our bodies also generate moisture, much like they do when we’re in a house, and that moisture moves around the house. So moisture that we create just through living through breathing and through things like taking showers, we need to control for. And so when you have vapor.

00:06:22 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:06:33 Kevin Collins

Closed products you got to be cognizant of how they behave and also accommodate some of these behavioral differences through maybe some other means.

00:06:43 Alina Michelewicz

OK, So what is it made of?

00:06:45 Alina Michelewicz

Exactly. Is it plastic?

00:06:47 Kevin Collins

It’s basically plastic, so it’s an insulating material made of polyurethane, which is kind of plastic. It’s kind of a wide catchall, I guess chemical generally it’s packaged as liquids and then when installed, a chemical reaction causes it to expand in place after it’s sprayed so it can expand into cavities and be useful in that way.

00:07:05 Michelle Moran

Interesting. Is it the same foam that we use for air sealing?

00:07:09 Kevin Collins

Yeah, definitely. Yep. So I think there’s there’s a lot of different ways you can prepare kind of the chemical formula to enhance certain traits for air sealing. It is a foam, it’s more rapidly expanding maybe. And I think that is usually open sell.

00:07:24 Michelle Moran

Interesting. And just quickly, could you tell our listeners what air sealing is?

00:07:27 Kevin Collins

Sure. Yeah. So air sealing is finding.

00:07:30 Kevin Collins

The cracks and crevices that are inherent in every home. When you think about joining 2 materials together like 2 pieces of plywood, it’s not going to be a perfect seal. And so you’d want to, in most cases, seal that up account for any leakage that you can and you could do that in many ways. You can do it with caulking. You can do it with a mastic. Brake foam is one way that we will treat air sealing.

00:07:51 Kevin Collins

In certain situations.

00:07:53 Alina Michelewicz

So my house has.

00:07:56 Alina Michelewicz

My house has a rain jacket because I have shingles and it has siding, right? Where should it have a sweater everywhere .

00:08:03 Kevin Collins

Yeah, definitely in the wall cavities. Yeah, that’s probably the best place to put your sweater material.

00:08:10 Alina Michelewicz

What about a hat?

00:08:12 Kevin Collins

Yeah, yeah. So these are great questions and it can be tough to kind of give prescriptive solutions across the board without seeing like each unique situation. But generally, if you think of a lot of the housing stock certainly in the Northeast and the probably much of the country we have.

00:08:29 Kevin Collins

Wood frame construction and then we have an attic. So that’s not always typical, but a lot of times we have an attic. So you will want to insulate if you have an existing House that needs insulation in the walls, in the cavities between those wood studs. So behind your drywall where your plaster and then in the attic the best case scenario is on the attic floor. There are other options you can insulate.

00:08:46 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:08:49 Kevin Collins

Up along the eaves.

00:08:50 Kevin Collins

It gets a little tricky. There a few things you want to be very careful of up there when you’re doing something like that, but if you’re just looking to really add some insulating value to your house and save some money on your bills, that would be the easiest, most straightforward way.

00:09:04 Michelle Moran

Not to go like super in the weeds, right? But the difference between those two processes you just described. So if you insulate the attic floor.

00:09:12 Michelle Moran

That means that that’s like the top of your house, right? If you’re, like up to the eaves of the roof and you’re at in your house thermally, right?

00:09:15 Kevin Collins

Totally.

00:09:19 Kevin Collins

That’s exactly right. Yep. So you’re changing the thermal boundary of your house. So you’re when you insulate, you’re kind of helping to define what that thermal boundary is. It’s going to, in most cases, inherently be your exterior walls, unless you have some kind of three season porch. And that’s kind of an open question sometimes, but for your attic, that’s exactly right.

00:09:38 Michelle Moran

Believe what Mass Save

00:09:39 Michelle Moran

Recommends for their general one to four family homes.

00:09:42 Michelle Moran

Cellulose blown-in cellulose insulation with air sealing, and they do the attic floor most of the time. I don’t believe they do the eaves in the roof.

00:09:49 Kevin Collins

And that that’s I think.

00:09:51 Kevin Collins

What would what I would recommend as well.

00:09:53 Alina Michelewicz

That’s if you’re not using the attic space for anything right.

00:09:57 Kevin Collins

Yeah, I think if you want to incorporate the attic space into like your conditioned envelope, you should really.

00:10:03 Kevin Collins

Do some careful planning.

00:10:04 Alina Michelewicz

Mmm.

00:10:04 Kevin Collins

You know, we can get into the specifics of why it matters, but when you’re insulating the roof decking to your house, you want to be careful about again to the rain jacket analogy, materials being able to dry properly and because foam is not super vapor open. Just generally speaking, you want to make sure that you’re not providing kind of a resting place.

00:10:24 Kevin Collins

For moisture behind it where it can accumulate.

00:10:27 Kevin Collins

And then potentially build up and eat away at some of these organic wood materials that are in a house.

00:10:32 Alina Michelewicz

OK. Yeah. So I think that kind of ties into this article that I saw on Guardian.

00:10:33 Kevin Collins

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Guardian one.

00:10:38 Alina Michelewicz

You have seen the article? An article in the Guardian call. “They Encouraged Us to Insulate Our Home, Now it’s Unmortgageable,” and I think that’s they’re talking about exactly what you were just saying, right. That the timber there was concern by the insurance company that the timbers would.

00:10:55 Alina Michelewicz

Get eaten away by moisture because there’s spray foam insulation on it.

00:10:58 Kevin Collins

Yeah. So I did have a chance to read the article and I pulled out a couple quotes and I think that’s exactly right. So one that really stuck out was “at the root of the problem are cowboy traders,” which I love that I love that visualization, “who apply the foam without a full survey or appropriate expertise. But because of lenders caution.

00:11:16 Kevin Collins

This is affecting other homeowners who had similar work,” so I think there’s two things going on. One, maybe folks who are not experienced or not certified to install the product and then the mortgage industry also being very risk averse, which is totally understandable from their point of view. For me, the articles focus sounds like folks tried to proceed in good faith and essentially perform.

00:11:36 Kevin Collins

The work themselves, maybe or with people that they know, or maybe folks like I said, who are not necessarily certified or experienced, and that may have been done without potentially a comprehensive plan or evaluation of the existing conditions. Maybe they didn’t have enough information at hand or were not aware of how building dynamics come into play.

00:11:53 Kevin Collins

So you know from what the article makes it sound like, some of the messaging from maybe the government was a little strong and pushing people in that direction. So it may not be their fault that they didn’t understand or have all the information they needed to make the right decision there.

00:12:06 Michelle Moran

I should clarify before we continue, this is in the UK, yeah, but the science applies everywhere.

00:12:12 Kevin Collins

Yeah, and I would agree. One another quote that kind of stuck out to me is “particularly alarming was spray gunning it into walls.”

00:12:20 Michelle Moran

Sounds like something cowboys do.

00:12:22 Alina Michelewicz

It does sound like something cowboys do!

00:12:23 Kevin Collins

Yeah, it sounds like the UK has a.

00:12:25 Kevin Collins

Cowboy problem maybe?

00:12:27 Kevin Collins

So I wouldn’t really recommend spray gunning a polyurethane product into a wall without seeing what the conditions are like in there for a number of reasons. You may already have a rot problem going on, so think about what we’ve been thinking about the vapor and moisture properties of foam. You don’t want to make that condition worse by putting in a material that can’t dry out.

00:12:47 Kevin Collins

Very well or inhibits other materials ability to dry out. The other part of the article mentions open cell foam, so there’s different dynamics from closed cell. It’s not impermeable to moisture and vapor, but it also doesn’t allow easy drying.

00:13:01 Kevin Collins

I think generally speaking, even I hesitate a little bit to blow something like cellulose into wall sight unseen, just through little holes. It’s work that I did a lot myself and I have had it done on my own house and I feel fine about it because we understand the properties of cellulose, it can really kind of allow moisture to move through it and dry out much more easily and disperse.

00:13:21 Kevin Collins

Foam does not do that, so if you’re blowing it into a wall cavity sight unseen, it could be a recipe for something bad, yeah?

00:13:28 Alina Michelewicz

Interesting.

00:13:29 Alina Michelewicz

OK. OK. So in the UK, we’re talking about these cowboy.

00:13:36 Alina Michelewicz

Cowboy installers, right? So how do you know if you’re installer is good? Like should you ask them certain questions? Like how do you get at that?

00:13:47 Kevin Collins

Certainly. Yeah. And I think this would, this is kind of a great rule of thumb for any kind of work you’re going to do on your house, right? You want to check your sources, you want to make sure that they’re experienced, that they’ve done this work before. There are certification programs for spray foam installers here. I’m not sure about the UK, but certainly in the US, there is a certification.

00:14:05 Kevin Collins

Program. The other thing that is slightly different maybe to where we are here with the Mass Save program compared to the UK is that the Mass Save program inspects the installations of their jobs that they help fund. And also you need to be registered with Mass Save as a contractor. So they do a lot of that vetting for you as opposed to in the UK.

00:14:25 Kevin Collins

The article mentions that there were hundreds of thousands of homes that may have been affected, but the quote is that “some of which may have been funded by the government.” So that again brings me back.

00:14:34 Kevin Collins

To the messaging may have been there that this is a good thing to do for your home, but I’m not sure what level of participation officially there was from the government in kind of paying for that, yeah.

00:14:45 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. OK. So the Mass Save program should give people Peace of Mind. Yeah, that’s awesome. OK, well, that’s a good segue. I have a lot of questions on insulation.

00:14:50 Kevin Collins

Great

00:14:57 Alina Michelewicz

So we did a home energy assessment and unfortunately we have not been tube wiring. So we we weren’t able to do some of the follow up.

00:15:03 Alina Michelewicz

From that yet.

00:15:05 Alina Michelewicz

But in the meantime I was interested to see if we could do any insulation.

00:15:11 Alina Michelewicz

To make our home more comfortable in the winter, so separately we had a vendor come.

00:15:13 Kevin Collins

Yep.

00:15:18 Alina Michelewicz

To look at the insulation potential at our house and they came back with a quote related to spray foam insulation. So that’s where some of my questions come from.

00:15:27 Kevin Collins

Let’s hear ‘em.

00:15:28 Alina Michelewicz

I read as a layman who knows nothing about this, that they can off gas in really dangerous ways, and it sounded like that only happens if the insulation is poor.

00:15:37 Kevin Collins

Sure.

00:15:40 Alina Michelewicz

But can you tell me about that?

00:15:43 Kevin Collins

Sure. Yeah. I think that’s a valid concern. Certainly a lot of materials that we have in our homes can off gas, they have VOC’s, volatile organic compounds, spray foam is no different than that. And each type or or variety can maybe have a different level of VOC’s. So VOC content is something that we want to be very cognisant.

00:16:03 Kevin Collins

It’s in our paints. It’s in finished materials, like carpets. Even in cleaning products that we use in our House.

00:16:10 Kevin Collins

So as long as we can install them properly and account for this off gassing process then it should be OK you know we learned to live with a lot of these risks and redirect the effects of them. So I think it’s just a matter, as you say, of making sure the installer knows what they’re doing because there is an inherent strategy.

00:16:30 Kevin Collins

Or correct way to blend the insulation so you make sure that it’s it’s kind of mixing properly.

00:16:38 Alina Michelewicz

OK, so because these installers are certified.

00:16:42 Alina Michelewicz

They should know how to do that properly and that would be properly mixed and all that.

00:16:46 Kevin Collins

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

00:16:48 Alina Michelewicz

Great. OK. My next concern is that this could be the next like asbestos vermiculite lead paint situation, right? It’s only been around for maybe a little while, so it hasn’t been like 30 years and people are trying to remove it from their house potentially. Is there a concern there I?

00:17:07 Alina Michelewicz

Guess.

00:17:08 Kevin Collins

Yeah. So that’s actually a great segue to what we were talking about just now about managing living with VOCs. So things like asbestos, vermiculite, and lead paint.

00:17:17 Kevin Collins

We live with these things now, right? So you can walk down the street and see homes with asbestos as siding that’s still in place. Lead paint. We often capsulated because it’s safer to kind of control it rather than just try and scrape it out and get it in the air and get it moving about. You also have to think about these materials when we’re trying to remediate.

00:17:36

Them.

00:17:37 Kevin Collins

You sometimes have to be very aggressive in how you remove them, and then you’re moving them somewhere else so that can sometimes create additional risk with like getting it into the atmosphere or getting it into the environment, affecting other people along the way. So sometimes the safest thing to do is to just kind of treat it properly in place. And so I think catastrophe might be like a little bit alarming.

00:17:59 Kevin Collins

But you know, in terms of spray foam, we do need to be concerned about it because VOC’s are carcinogenic as we know, but it’s in a lot of things. So we need to be cognisant of our exposure to VOC’s and especially how we treat ventilation in buildings.

00:18:13 Kevin Collins

I think another thing that is not spoken about enough, which is a totally different topic, is radon. That’s something that’s naturally occurring, which just comes up from the ground in our homes and they’re not really built to deal with it, so.

00:18:27 Kevin Collins

Yeah, we fight a lot of fronts.

00:18:29 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. Yeah, I just. OK, I have. I have this old roomate of mine who listens to this podcast who said that I frequently sound very suspicious.

00:18:42 Kevin Collins

I think that’s a good quality.

00:18:43 Alina Michelewicz

And and so this episode basically is me being very suspicious because spray foam insulation is something that people are just like so excited about that I’m just like people are too excited about.

00:18:54 Alina Michelewicz

This.

00:18:55 Kevin Collins

Hmm.

00:18:55 Alina Michelewicz

Like it, it’s suspicious in a way that, like people were so excited about asbestos, people were so excited.

00:19:01 Alina Michelewicz

How great lead was it like maintaining pigments in paint?

00:19:04 Kevin Collins

Yeah.

00:19:05 Alina Michelewicz

It’s suspicious. Is it suspicious? Should I be suspicious?

00:19:07 Kevin Collins

Sure.

00:19:11 Kevin Collins

I think I think your suspicions. I think your intuition is is right. That’s a great quality.

00:19:16 Kevin Collins

I think spray foam has its uses and I think we need to be aware of that to your point that maybe lead or vermiculite, we’re not save all the silver bullet kind of technologies we shouldn’t spray foam the.

00:19:30 Kevin Collins

Planet by any means.

00:19:33 Kevin Collins

It should be used in really like well defined and succinct.

00:19:36 Kevin Collins

Strategies. So let’s take like a few real world examples, right? So think about a detached single family home. You may see spray foam around the top of the foundation walls and the rim joist cavities, or along with the band still.

00:19:48 Kevin Collins

You might see it in your attic along the top plates of your interior walls. You might even see it along the other side of the roof sheathing, which, as we said, is kind of a different situation. You might see it inside your walls and not be aware of it unless you do some DIY work in commercial buildings, we may see it in areas that require high R value in smaller spaces or in areas where we’re concerned about vapor and moisture control.

00:20:08 Kevin Collins

Due to various dynamics pertaining to temperature gradients, vapor drive due.

00:20:12 Kevin Collins

Point a lot of tricky stuff like that, but it should be in defined areas where we’re dealing with a lot of things at once, so the benefits of spray foam is that it has high R value like we mentioned and it has those particular vapor qualities. But you can still get high R value through other insulation materials and you can control vapor by pairing them with something else like a

00:20:33 Kevin Collins

Vapor control layer

00:20:34 Kevin Collins

Reasons why you may not want to use spray foam is the environmental impact that it composed, so it has a high embodied carbon compared to other insulating products. It also has blowing agents in it, which as we know, blowing agents contain aerosols and that can have greenhouse gas potential.

00:20:52 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:20:53 Kevin Collins

So there are plenty of reasons not to use it. I would certainly advocate to use other insulating products, specifically wood fiber, insulation, cellulose, fiberglass in that order. And then you spray foam when you need to use it in some.

00:21:07 Kevin Collins

Of these tricky spots.

00:21:09 Alina Michelewicz

Ok, interesting.

00:21:11 Molly Craft

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00:23:06 Michelle Moran

So the embodied carbon will not change, no matter what of this spray foam, even if it like saves a person or a homeowner money. But the body carbon that’s used to make transport and then potentially remove and destroy it later is very, very high.

00:23:21 Kevin Collins

Definitely. And actually that’s a great point removing.

00:23:24 Kevin Collins

And reinstalling. That’s kind of for me. What drives your choice of what insulation material you want to use for specific conditions? If you want to try and totally move away from foam, I think it’s very admirable.

00:23:36 Kevin Collins

But if you have one of those tricky spots where you’re worried about condensation, you need higher R value. You really want to think about the lifetime of the building. If you do end up having a problem 5,10, 20=m 30 years down the road, and you have to RIP out what you’ve installed there and put in new stuff that has another carbon impact. So you’re kind of doubling what your intention was there.

00:23:57 Kevin Collins

So if you can control for that situation and use a foam product, yes, it may have a higher embodied carbon count, but you won’t have to ideally rip it out later and then do some remediation work which has another carbon cost to it.

00:24:10 Michelle Moran

That makes me curious, so we in our last episode spoke to Wen and Paul and Wen was.

00:24:16 Michelle Moran

Talking a lot about.

00:24:17 Michelle Moran

Installation in the Boston area. Is there anything like you said, there’s certified installers. Are there certified removers yet or anybody that like knows how to do this safely?

00:24:28 Kevin Collins

That’s a good question. I think removing spray foam is not very easy because it does, it expands into crevices. It doesn’t really kind of peel off like you would imagine other products might. So I’m sure there are certified removers just as they’re certified professionals to remediate a lot of situations. It would really depend on the situation.

00:24:48 Kevin Collins

I think in many cases, as long as your foam is not causing damage and tertiary waste to your other building components, then it’s probably fine to just.

00:24:56 Kevin Collins

Leave it there.

00:24:58 Alina Michelewicz

What about the potential fire hazard compared to other insulating materials?

00:25:05 Kevin Collins

Definitely. Yeah. So in terms of fire hazards, always use an expert fire is essentially what began building codes. And so people are very cognizant of fire and all kind of construction projects, all building applications in terms of testing product spray foam can be treated with flame retardants to reduce flamability.

00:25:24 Kevin Collins

But materials and assemblies are tested and fire rated depending on how they stack and interact and where.

00:25:30 Kevin Collins

They are in.

00:25:30 Kevin Collins

The building how the foam is mixed can play into flammability, potentially, and how the foam is installed and allowed to cure. So foam is installed in what

00:25:40 Kevin Collins

They call lifts.

00:25:42 Kevin Collins

Just get a little technical for a second.

00:25:44 Kevin Collins

And that lift is essentially spraying one layer, allowing it to cure and then spraying another layer.

00:25:50 Kevin Collins

On top. So there are concerns with the curing process. If you were to go ahead and spray, say, 12 inches all at once, that chemical reaction releases a lot of energy as it’s curing, and it needs to dissipate that energy. So if it’s too thick, then it may cause a problem.

00:26:07 Kevin Collins

Yeah. Always use an expert.

00:26:07 Alina Michelewicz

Interesting.

00:26:09 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, it sounds like.

00:26:11 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:26:12 Michelle Moran

I think you mentioned this to me, Kevin, when we were chatting earlier about this, but was this the issue with the Grenfell fires? The big fire in London? The towers? Yeah.

00:26:20 Kevin Collins

The towers.

00:26:22 Kevin Collins

Yeah. So I’m not. I’m not sure about the specifics of that.

00:26:25 Kevin Collins

Case.

00:26:26 Kevin Collins

Yeah, but we can just chat about it. Generally, I think that may have been an exterior foam application and I’m not sure.

00:26:32 Kevin Collins

So, just kind of going on a tangent about how they test these things. There’s a whole fire testing authority where you can, say, put together a building component, a little miniature model. Not so miniature. Kind of like the size of this wall. And it has your drywall, it has your framing. It has your insulation. They’ll put it in a chamber.

00:26:53 Kevin Collins

And light it on fire and see how the flame spreads. If it spreads at all, what ignites how long it takes it to ignite.

00:27:00 Kevin Collins

And so in a lot of situations, from what I understand, there were exterior foam products installed on buildings that weren’t maybe tested to that degree or perhaps like a a fire got so intense. And so hot that it didn’t really matter anymore. We know pretty much anything can burn, right? But these are.

00:27:20 Kevin Collins

Petrochemical products, so they are inherently more flammable than something like, you know steel. So I think in that situation fire spread up the foam.

00:27:29 Kevin Collins

Exterior sheathing, so that’s what the problem was, yeah.

00:27:32 Michelle Moran

So as opposed to some of the other materials you mentioned today though. Blown in cellulose fiberglass this is more flammable.

00:27:39 Michelle Moran

In general.

00:27:39 Kevin Collins

I would defer to the experts on that. Yeah, certainly. So fiberglass is a spun glass. It shouldn’t combust. Same with mineral wool. That’s a that’s a spun rock product, essentially. So that shouldn’t combust. Cellulose is recycled newspaper. It will combust, although it’s not super sensitive to that. It’s treated with fire retardants as well.

00:27:59 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:27:59 Michelle Moran

Interesting.

00:28:01 Alina Michelewicz

OK. And some questions specific to my house.

00:28:03 Alina Michelewicz

I got.

00:28:04 Alina Michelewicz

Quotes for insulation before we realized there was.

00:28:07 Alina Michelewicz

Knob and tube the 1st.

00:28:09 Alina Michelewicz

Area was the attic which we used the storage and so the recommendation was.

00:28:14 Alina Michelewicz

To put it.

00:28:14 Alina Michelewicz

On the eaves.

00:28:16 Alina Michelewicz

Now when you’re in the attic where there’s knot holes, you can poke the shingles like it’s a shingle.

00:28:22 Kevin Collins

There’s no roof sheathing.

00:28:24 Alina Michelewicz

There’s no roof sheathing. So their recommendation was to put closed cell foam on it and I was like, but that’s like the the roof.

00:28:24 Kevin Collins

Sure.

00:28:32 Kevin Collins

Right.

00:28:33 Kevin Collins

You know, I think given the fact that we’re trying to create solutions in existing housing where we can’t really design around a lot of the conditions that are inherent to the building and also the environment that we put them in. You know, we still want to insulate along the attic floor and maybe build up a platform for storage rather than kind of interfere with a lot of the.

00:28:53 Alina Michelewicz

Oh.

00:28:54 Kevin Collins

Connective nature of an addic, that’s essential.

00:28:56 Kevin Collins

The outdoors already, if you can see daylight up there, that means there’s a lot of drying going on. It kind of changes with the seasons. If you were to block off that daylight and really seal it up, you would need to really strategize for that. Incorporate ventilation. Think about how these materials are going to dry out. If you encapsulate them in foam, it would be much more.

00:29:17 Kevin Collins

Of a process.

00:29:18 Alina Michelewicz

OK, so that was an interesting one.

00:29:20 Kevin Collins

Yeah, I would be. It’s been there.

00:29:22 Alina Michelewicz

I was very.

00:29:23 Alina Michelewicz

Skeptical and I was just like.

00:29:24 Alina Michelewicz

I’m the I’m not like.

00:29:25 Kevin Collins

It’s gonna cause you pause there. Yeah.

00:29:27 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, but I it’s.

00:29:28 Alina Michelewicz

Weird because it’s like if I didn’t work.

00:29:30 Alina Michelewicz

Here I wouldn’t have.

00:29:31 Kevin Collins

Yeah. We really got to do our research for anything we do in our homes kind of on our own in that regard. We can seek recommendations from contractors and folks who say they’ve done it before, but we really need to do our own leg work on the back end, talk to people, check references, that sort of thing.

00:29:48 Alina Michelewicz

OK, here’s here’s the second spot. We have a 200 year old single family home.

00:29:51 Kevin Collins

Yeah.

00:29:55 Alina Michelewicz

With a fieldstone basement and it’s stamp because there’s an old New England house, so the recommendation there by the same company was to put closed cell like just over the wall of the basement.

00:29:59 Kevin Collins

Mhm.

00:30:12 Alina Michelewicz

And I was like. But water comes, like, comes in through some of the cracks. And I was like, So what will happen to that water? And they said, well, it’ll. Just run down the back.

00:30:20 Kevin Collins

You have great intuition and your this is your suspicion, like doing doing great great things for you. So I love this. Yeah. So I think when it comes to basements and existing homes, especially old homes.

00:30:32 Kevin Collins

My house is 100 years old, so I.

00:30:34 Kevin Collins

Totally empathize with your situation. There. We need to be very cognizant of moisture control and water control. If you have a fieldstone foundation.

00:30:45 Kevin Collins

There’s very few ways you can make it totally dry in your basement without excavating around the exterior. Putting in a French drain, doing a lot of things. There’s no simple solutions, and I think some folks have had success with spray foaming.

00:31:00 Kevin Collins

On the inside of their foundation, fieldstone walls. But it may be due to a little bit of luck. Little bit of kind of conditions that are unique to where they are. You can spray foam foundation walls as long as you account for that water and that drainage. So we often recommend using foam in foundation situations.

00:31:21 Kevin Collins

As long as you have a drainage plane behind it and an.

00:31:24 Kevin Collins

Air gap and then accounting for what is going to happen with that drainage. So that’s usually kind of putting in a tile drain beneath it and then figuring out where it’s going to go, whether through a sump pump or running to daylight, something like that. And Building Science Corporation did some great testing where they looked at the impact of insulation.

00:31:46 Kevin Collins

In assemblies where you have that air gap, because I think folks were concerned that, you know, if you have a layer of air, isn’t that defeating the point of insulating right?

00:31:54 Kevin Collins

And they found that you can have a pretty significant gap maybe 1/4 inch or 1/8 inch and the impact to the insulating value of the assembly is pretty.

00:32:03 Kevin Collins

Minimal.

00:32:04 Kevin Collins

So controlling for moisture and allowing it to drain out through that kind of drainage plane can still provide like a good insulating impact to your basement.

00:32:14 Alina Michelewicz

Hm, But you wouldn’t just stick it on the wall.

00:32:15 Kevin Collins

I personally would not yeah, especially if you are seeing water come into the basement.

00:32:23 Michelle Moran

I have a follow up question to this. All right, so say it wasn’t a fieldstone foundation. It was a, you know, standard foundation. And you could do this, you could spray foam it and insulate it. You were just talking about radon with that. If the home had radon coming in through the basement, would that make it worse or keep?

00:32:38 Michelle Moran

It in the. House or anything like that?

00:32:39 Kevin Collins

It could. Yeah. So that’s kind of the dynamics.

00:32:43 Kevin Collins

We need to be cognisant of as we seal up our homes, our existing housing stock, by and large, is very leaky and that does a couple things. It allows for high air exchanges of fresh air, not really intentionally.

00:32:56 Kevin Collins

Right. We. It’s just that when we built these homes, we didn’t have the products we have now that we.

00:33:00 Kevin Collins

Can seal them up with. We did our best.

00:33:01 Michelle Moran

No Polyiso, polyurethane.

00:33:03 Kevin Collins

Yeah. No, no phones back then. Horsehair, plaster. You know, we know that. That’s very. Yeah. That’s my house too. And so we tried to make homes airtight. We just didn’t have these products we have now. So they weren’t presented with the challenges that we’re seeing now with moisture control. Air quality was not a thing. They were necessarily cognisant of way back then other than.

00:33:22 Kevin Collins

Controlling for combustion through chimneys and stuff like that and so as we seal up these old homes, we need to be aware of how moisture behaves and how we provide more fresh air for a building.

00:33:33 Kevin Collins

Radon is great example in a lot of new construction. If you’re in an area that is susceptible to radon, it’s required by code to install a radon system. So if we’re sealing up an existing home and you’re in a high risk radon area, you should definitely test and you should be aware of providing more fresh air for your building or finding a way to evacuate.

00:33:54 Kevin Collins

Existing radon that you have down there.

00:33:56 Michelle Moran

Is that why a lot of New England homes have whole home box fans?

00:34:00 Kevin Collins

Oh yeah, that’s a great one. That’s that’s a that’s a hot topic in, in the building world. That’s the whole House fan that was kind of to steal, that nice cold air from your basement. Bring it up through the house. But you’re exactly right in thinking about that while we’re talking about radon, if you’re bringing up a lot of those bad contaminants from your basement, contaminants like potentially radon.

00:34:20 Kevin Collins

But also that’s where your you know, classically your combustion fuel equipment was. So you’re bringing up imagine hot water tank your classic atmosphere, combustion hot water tank running while you have a whole House fan going, you’re pulling up that burning air through the rest of your house, potentially causing it to Backdraft as well, so those.

00:34:37 Kevin Collins

Fans have a big fan club. Pardon the pun, but you need to be careful of them and I think, at least in my house, when I have tried to utilize the cool basement air for some passive cooling in the.

00:34:51 Kevin Collins

Summer it definitely has a smell to it.

00:34:52 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, yeah. OK situation #3. So there was an extension put on the House of a kitchen.

00:35:01 Alina Michelewicz

And the part of the kitchen that you walk on is over the basement. But the part of the kitchen that’s like they built the cabinets and the counter on is just like over some air. And so underneath that someone had put fiberglass at some point. But it’s like old and not really insulating anymore.

00:35:21 Alina Michelewicz

And there’s no like air barrier, so it just it’s very cold and the sink is also there. So we had the pipe freeze, it didn’t burst, but it froze cause there was no insulation so.

00:35:33 Alina Michelewicz

What was suggested was just put closed cell on that, but then it would be just closed cell exposed to like the air of the outside world, which I was. I just thought was kind of strange. Sure. Is that strange?

00:35:49 Kevin Collins

I wouldn’t say it’s strange. I understand the suspicion.

00:35:54 Kevin Collins

I think that would be actually a great application for spray foam. These kind of hangover floor slash ceiling situations where you need to pack more R value and also be concerned about moisturedrag. The one thing to keep in mind for that.

00:36:07 Kevin Collins

Is you would likely want to essentially pack around that drain or the pipes with that closed cell spray foam. If you ever did have a problem the only way to fix it is by ripping out the foam, but as long as you don’t anticipate problems then that’s a great way to insulate it. Other ways would be to maybe pack it full.

00:36:27 Kevin Collins

Of a dense pack, cellulose or something similar. Dense pack fiberglass is probably better because of.

00:36:34 Kevin Collins

Sensitivity to moisture in that area. Being beneath your kitchen appliances in your sink, and then putting some other kind of material at the bottom of the joist like a like a plywood or something like that, pressure treated.

00:36:46 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. Interesting. OK. So, so the kitchen situation.

00:36:52 Alina Michelewicz

Maybe a positive and then maybe the basement, but not straight on the fieldstone. Yeah. Interesting. This answers a lot of my.

00:36:53 Kevin Collins

Yeah.

00:37:00 Alina Michelewicz

Questions.

00:37:00 Kevin Collins

Good. That’s great.

00:37:02 Alina Michelewicz

Cool. I’m very excited. Now I’m going to go look at these spaces again with fresh eyes.

00:37:07 Kevin Collins

Yeah. And I think when you’re debating between materials that you want to use for insulating, you want to think about how these materials behave when it comes to moisture and water, they all have their own applications in terms of their insulating properties, and that’s great.

00:37:23 Kevin Collins

But what we’re very concerned about these days as homes get more airtight, is where moisture goes.

00:37:29 Kevin Collins

So when you think about something like cellulose insulation, it’s a recycled newspaper. Newspapers can get wet and they can stay wet, but they can also dry out. Think about when you’re reading a book, not a Kindle, paper back, and you dropped the water droplet on it. That water is not going to stay in the area that it dropped. It’s going to spread out.

00:37:49 Kevin Collins

But it’s going to dry out and you can still use that book. Conversely, think about taking your Tupperware out of the dishwasher and it’s still.

00:37:56 Kevin Collins

Wet. If you put the lid on that and put it in your cabinet, that water is still going to be there when you go to use it. However, a few days down the road a week down the road and so our foam insulation is very similar in that way. You need to essentially assist it with how it’s going to dry out that water, whereas cellulose can kind of shoulder some of that load and disperse it.

00:38:17 Kevin Collins

Much more easily.

00:38:18 Michelle Moran

That ties back to the concerns that they have in the UK with the the spray form. Right. Interesting, yeah.

00:38:25 Alina Michelewicz

Interesting.

00:38:27 Alina Michelewicz

I still feel somewhat suspicious, but not nearly as much. So as I felt before.

00:38:31 Kevin Collins

That’s good. Yeah, based on some of the recommendations, I would share your some of your suspicions.

00:38:38 Kevin Collins

You know, we have to be cognisant in these old homes that there’s only so much we can do before we put ourselves in bad situations. So we want to do a lot, you know, the storage thing is certainly something we all want. But you got to maybe find some kind of compromise sometimes or.

00:38:52 Kevin Collins

Spend a little bit more money to do essentially some like more robust construction work to kind of make it all function properly.

00:38:59 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, yeah.

00:39:01 Michelle Moran

It’s kind of the same answer as Kristin’s episode. If you want something that is healthy and done right, you really have to research constantly about what you’re purchasing and what you’re using and who you’re using to install it.

00:39:14 Kevin Collins

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Because most importantly, we want to think about the lifetime of the building and the lifetime of the people using the building and not causing any side effects from the things that we’re doing to the building or inside the building.

00:39:27 Michelle Moran

Any other deep thoughts about spray foam?

00:39:31 Kevin Collins

Deep thoughts, I guess. We talked about wet basements and mold. That was all kind of related.

00:39:35 Alina Michelewicz

Can mold grow on the?

00:39:38 Alina Michelewicz

Directly on that surface, because it’s not pourous, right?

00:39:40 Kevin Collins

So.

00:39:42 Kevin Collins

So open cell is more porous. OK, mold needs moisture. The right temperature range and organic material to eat. So needs like those three things. But you know you can have organic material settle on open cell foam that can create kind of like a food for it just from like dust or something like that.

00:40:02 Kevin Collins

Over time. Yeah. Yeah. I’m actually very much a try to use something else other than foam first, but a strong proponent of using foam.

00:40:13 Kevin Collins

Where it needs to be.

00:40:14 Kevin Collins

Used because of that aspect of thinking about the life of the building and not taking unnecessary risks in certain scenarios. But it’s definitely by no means a silver bullet solution to all of your insulation and moisture needs. It can be far from that, yeah.

00:40:32 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:40:33 Michelle Moran

You must think about it.

00:40:34 Michelle Moran

Pretty frequently though, if you’re.

00:40:36 Michelle Moran

Working on buildings that are being constructed now that are going to last 100 years and we’re thinking about also the changing climate and the humidity probably increasing up here.

00:40:47 Michelle Moran

Wow.

00:40:48 Kevin Collins

I wouldn’t say it keeps me up at night, but yeah, it keeps.

00:40:51 Kevin Collins

Me up at night sometimes.

00:40:53 Kevin Collins

Yeah.

00:40:54 Alina Michelewicz

Are the new like multifamily buildings having spray foam in the walls or are they is it used only in those specific circumstances?

00:41:02 Kevin Collins

More in retrofits because of kind of these unique scenarios where you’re given a problem to solve.

00:41:08 Kevin Collins

That you.

00:41:09 Kevin Collins

Weren’t allowed to develop the framework to, and you have to do that thing where we said squeeze a lot of R value, maybe into a small space. But new construction generally you are using foam board, a lot of the time or you’re using a mineral wool board or a wood fiber board and then in cavities, you’re often using a batt insulation or a blown in insulation like Cellulose or fiberglass.

00:41:11 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:41:29 Kevin Collins

There are a lot of ways you can do it, but oftentimes cost is a driver. Foam is more expensive than these other materials.

00:41:37 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. And if it’s a really large factor.

00:41:39 Kevin Collins

It’s a large building with big cavities. You can fill them with a lot of material.

00:41:45 Kevin Collins

And then what we know is a great solution now is continuous insulation on the exterior that does a great job of mitigating thermal bridging effects. And you don’t need much to do that. So in a combination with your cavity insulation and your continuous insulation, you can put together really well high performing wall assembly without needing foam for.

00:42:03 Kevin Collins

The most part?

00:42:05 Alina Michelewicz

Nice. That’s interesting.

00:42:07 Kevin Collins

I want to hear more foam suspicion because I’m here for it.

00:42:13 Alina Michelewicz

I mean, those are my main 3 from my own experience but.

00:42:15 Kevin Collins

How long ago did they quote you on?

00:42:17 Kevin Collins

That.

00:42:19 Kevin Collins

The other thing is things are changing fast. We’re learning more. Sometimes it feels like by the month, certainly by the year. We know a lot more about foam than we knew five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. And a lot of it’s been through trial and error a lot of times we will see legacy spray foam installation projects where the mixture.

00:42:38 Kevin Collins

Wasn’t great, and it isn’t necessarily a mold concern or a fire concern, but from a performance aspect we’ve seen situations where it’s pulling away and kind of contracting.

00:42:50 Alina Michelewicz

Oh, interesting, yeah.

00:42:51 Kevin Collins

To the degree that in some situations we’ve seen it pulling apart framing because it had that kind of grip on it.

00:42:59 Alina Michelewicz

Wow. Yeah.

00:42:59 Kevin Collins

And so that’s obviously a huge problem, but.

00:43:03 Alina Michelewicz

How quickly does that kind of issue show up like it was like 5 years old, ten years old?

00:43:07 Kevin Collins

I would, I think that’s probably a good range. Yeah, that was. That’s an extreme scenario. But yeah, that’s what you know, getting these mixtures right really means sometimes it won’t adhere properly. I mean, and again, that kind of comes down to making sure that people installing are certified and know.

00:43:21 Kevin Collins

What they’re doing?

00:43:21 Kevin Collins

They’ve done it before because you can go to a store now and buy a two-part spray foam solution and go into your house and go crazy.

00:43:22 Alina Michelewicz

Can you really?

00:43:28 Kevin Collins

Yeah.

00:43:29 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. So will there be?

00:43:30 Alina Michelewicz

An issue though, like this unmortgagable concept of like they won’t know whether you had a certified installer or whether you just went to.

00:43:38 Alina Michelewicz

Home Depot and bought it.

00:43:39 Kevin Collins

It’s a great point and I think it does come down to messaging. So the, the, the most worrying aspect of that article to me was not necessarily that people were using.

00:43:47 Kevin Collins

Foam.

00:43:48 Kevin Collins

Or the inherent characteristics of foam and what it can do, but that folks felt very emboldened to go and do these foam projects without maybe enough research. But again, we do a lot of things to our homes that maybe.

00:44:00 Kevin Collins

Mortgage companies aren’t aware of and, and buyers aren’t aware of so.

00:44:04 Kevin Collins

There’s a lot of degrees of risk to that. So I think that may be one reason, speaking to the article, why they put kind of a blanket concern over all foam, because they want to step back and evaluate what’s going on 1st.

00:44:17 Kevin Collins

We have great tools for air sealing and insulating. Right now it comes down to reducing the cracks and penetrations in your home as best you can, but just by filling them with materials.

00:44:28 Kevin Collins

Building Materials sealing them with things like caulking, mastic and then insulating with things like fiberglass, cellulose, wood fiber, and controlling for that vapor drive and that moisture drive. So we have a lot of tools at our disposal. It’s just a matter of knowing how and when to use them and also using foam in some of these trickier situations and being aware of the dynamics at play.

00:44:50 Kevin Collins

When you’re using it.

00:44:52 Michelle Moran

Any closing thoughts before we head out to lunch today, Kevin?

00:44:55 Kevin Collins

I think we just about covered everything. Just be cognisant of the conditions that you’re trying to insulate and do your research and always hire an expert.

00:45:06 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, thanks for that. Thanks for easing yy fears.

00:45:09 Kevin Collins

Anytime. Hopefully.

00:45:12 Alina Michelewicz

We’ll talk to you again soon.

00:45:15 Kevin Collins

All right, thanks everyone.

00:45:16 Michelle Moran

Thanks so much Kevin for chatting with us today and for all that insight into spray foam insulation, we encourage all of our listeners to check out our previous episodes and like rate and follow BuildingWell on your preferred player. Stay up to date for future developments and episodes on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Pandora and most other podcast services.

00:45:36 Michelle Moran

Information on this episode, including show notes, references, and the transcript, can be found on our website at newecology.org/buildingwell-podcast. Please follow New Ecology on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter at New Ecology.

00:45:53 Michelle Moran

And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in today. See you on the next episode!

00:45:57 Michelle Moran

The season 1 BuildingWell Podcast Committee at New Ecology is led and organized by Alina Michelewicz and Michelle Moran, with Molly Craft and Michael Abdelmessih. Episode description by Kevin Collins.

00:46:14 Molly Craft

This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.

00:46:19

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