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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00:22:52 Molly Craft
That’s it for today’s Mass Save minutes. Thanks for joining us. Remember, don’t start that renovation process without checking out what Mass Save can offer you until next time. Stay informed and energy conscious.
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
Music plays.