Saint John Spray Foam Insulation
Saint John, New Brunswick ยท across Greater Saint John
We install spray foam insulation in attics, cellars, crawl spaces, garages and commercial buildings. · Every price is written and fixed before we start.
Saint John Spray Foam Insulation provides attic insulation, basement insulation and crawl space insulation to the Saint John area. Spray foam insulation is the only thing we install, and every job is priced in writing before a gun comes out. Most people who call have already paid for insulation once and did not get what they paid for.
Spray foam insulation is doing two separate jobs at the same time. It slows heat moving through a surface, which is what any insulation does. It also blocks air moving through the gaps around and behind that surface, which almost nothing else does. The second job is usually where the comfort was hiding.
We insulate attics, cellars, crawl spaces, garages, rim joists, new framing and commercial roof decks, and we strip out spray foam insulation that somebody else got wrong. Nothing gets a price until one of us has stood in the space.
Three things get us started: the type of space, an approximate size, and what the insulation in it is doing wrong. Or call +1 506-300-4863.
Spray foam insulation is the whole business, not a sideline added to a renovation company. That shows up in the parts of a spray foam insulation job nobody sees, which are the parts that decide whether it lasts.
We read the substrate temperature before the gun comes out, not the air temperature. Spray foam insulation sprayed onto a surface below the insulation's minimum shrinks and lets go, and the surface is usually colder than the room.
When spray foam insulation is not what a building needs, that is what you will hear. Plenty of houses are better served by sealing the ceiling plane and adding to the existing depth, at a fraction of what we would otherwise have quoted.
We do one visit, write one insulation specification, and give you one price. No number changes after the fact. Read more about how we work on our about page.
Every space gets its spray foam insulation specified against its own conditions. There is no default insulation depth here.
No single surface on a building loses more heat than the one over your head, and none is cheaper to put spray foam insulation into. In a tall house it is worse again, because air rising through three storeys reaches the ceiling with real force behind it.
View Attic Insulation
A cellar is the one part of a building that is cold, damp and connected to everything above it at the same time. Left without spray foam insulation it drags the ground floor down and pushes moist air up through the house.
View Basement Insulation
A crawl space is a cellar nobody can stand up in, which is exactly why its insulation gets ignored. The floor above it is cold, the air in it moves up into the house, and almost nobody has looked at the insulation in years.
View Crawl Space Insulation
Two separate problems get called garage insulation, and spray foam insulation answers both. One is wanting the garage itself usable. The other is the cold room sitting above it.
View Garage Insulation
Open framing is the cheapest opportunity anybody gets to install spray foam insulation properly, and it lasts a few weeks. Every insulation decision after boarding is more expensive and less effective.
View New Construction Insulation
Similar rigs, similar guns, two spray foam insulation products whose behaviour diverges enough that picking the wrong insulation is a failure rather than a trade-off.
View Closed Cell and Open Cell Spray Foam
Two reasons insulation comes out. Either it has failed on its own over decades, or somebody installed spray foam insulation badly and it never worked.
View Insulation Removal and Replacement
Warehouses, workshops, shops, offices above shops, and the parts of an industrial building where the temperature actually has to hold. Larger surfaces, harder access, and a schedule that has to work around a business that is still running.
View Commercial and Industrial InsulationRooms stop having a cold end. Most temperature swings inside a house are air movement rather than conduction, and closing the air path is the part of the job only spray foam insulation does.
Heating equipment runs shorter cycles behind spray foam insulation, because it is not fighting a constant exchange with outside.
Dust, pollen and outside smells drop, because they were arriving through the same openings the heat was leaving through.
Closed cell spray foam insulation is its own vapour control at sufficient thickness, so no separate poly layer is needed against a foundation wall.
The insulation does not sag, settle, compress or get pushed aside by anything living in the building.
Tell us what you are up against. You will get the spray foam insulation that suits it, including the times that means the cheaper one.
Batt and loose fill insulation resist heat travelling through them. Neither insulation stops air travelling around it, and that is the gap spray foam insulation exists to close.
That distinction sounds academic until you look at where the gaps actually are: around every light fitting and bathroom fan, down the back of a chimney chase, around the plumbing stack, at the top plate where an interior wall meets the ceiling, behind a knee wall, and at the perimeter of every floor.
Add a foot of loose fill insulation over an unsealed ceiling and you have insulated the leaks. You have not closed them.
Spray foam insulation is applied wet and expands into whatever shape the gap happens to be, then hardens there. It becomes the air barrier and the insulation in one pass, which is why a modest depth of it often outperforms a much deeper layer of something else.
This is the part that makes spray foam insulation here different from the same insulation an hour inland.
Saint John sits on the Bay of Fundy and gets somewhere around seventy days of fog a year. Cold water against warmer air keeps the outdoor air close to saturated for long stretches, particularly late spring through summer.
That matters because an air leak is never only a heat leak, and no amount of insulation depth closes one. Air carries water vapour with it, in whatever direction it happens to be moving.
In winter, warm indoor air pushes out through gaps in the ceiling and the upper walls, cools inside the assembly, and drops its moisture on the first cold surface it meets. In summer, the direction reverses. Saturated outside air works down into cool cellars and crawl spaces and condenses there. Same openings, opposite season.
More insulation depth does nothing about either one. Spray foam insulation sealing the openings does. This is the single strongest argument for spray foam insulation in this city, and it has almost nothing to do with R-value.
The second thing worth knowing about the local building stock, and it changes where the spray foam insulation goes first.
This is Canada's oldest incorporated city, chartered in 1785, and a great deal of what stands today went up after the fire of 1877 burned through roughly two hundred acres and more than sixteen hundred buildings. What replaced it was tall. Two and a half and three storeys, narrow, packed close, and a lot of it on slopes running down to the harbour.
Tall matters, and it is why insulation depth alone never settles these houses. Warm air inside a heated building rises and escapes at the top, and outside air is pulled in at the bottom to replace it. The taller the warm column and the colder it is outside, the harder that pull gets.
A three-storey house with an open stair works like a chimney. Many houses of that era are also balloon framed, meaning the stud cavities run without interruption from the cellar to the attic, so there is a clear vertical channel running straight past whatever insulation is in the walls.
Spray foam insulation at the top of a building like that changes more than the same insulation applied in the middle. It is worth knowing before you decide where to spend.
Closed cell comes out dense and hard, running around R-6 to R-7 an inch and drifting to about R-6.5 with age. Put enough of it on and it controls vapour by itself, and it stiffens whatever it fills.
Open cell is about a third of that density, stays soft, and runs around R-3.5 to R-3.8 an inch. It blocks air, it will never block vapour no matter how thick you go, and it soaks up sound instead of carrying it.
Anything against masonry, below grade, in contact with the ground, or under a roof deck gets closed cell. Interior partitions, floors between storeys and deep awkward cavities inside the heated envelope are where open cell earns its place.
A contractor who names the insulation before seeing the space is quoting from a price list, not writing a specification. See our closed cell and open cell spray foam page for the full comparison.
Two spray foam insulation approaches, and the roof decides which.
Keeping the attic vented means closing every hole in the ceiling first and laying the insulation over a sealed plane. Where the roof is simple and the attic holds nothing but air, that insulation is cheaper and it works.
Bringing the attic inside means spray foam insulation against the sheathing and up the gables, with the vents permanently shut.
The second one wins where equipment or ducting sits above the ceiling, where the roof is cut up by dormers and valleys, where a finished room hides dead space behind knee walls, or where the eaves ice up every year. See our attic insulation page for how we make that call.
Below-grade space is where the fog-belt problem does its damage, and where insulation choice matters most.
Stone, rubble and older poured foundations are common here, and they are not dry. Studding a wall like that out and filling it with batt puts something absorbent tight against damp masonry, and in a humid summer that assembly grows things.
Closed cell spray foam insulation goes straight onto the wall. No stud bay behind it, no cavity to hold moist air, no absorbent insulation anywhere in the assembly. The masonry can still be damp and it no longer matters, because nothing on the warm side of it can take on water.
Crawl spaces get the same spray foam insulation on the walls, over a taped ground sheet, and the vents get closed. A vented crawl space in a fog belt is a machine for pulling saturated air in under the floor. See our basement insulation and crawl space insulation pages for more on each.
Where the floor joists land on the foundation there is a strip of framing, usually a couple of hundred millimetres deep, running the whole way around the building, and it is the cheapest spray foam insulation in the house.
It is thin, it is fully exposed to outside, and it has a joint at the top and a joint at the bottom. In an older house the only insulation on it is a scrap of batt and nothing else.
It is one of the largest single air leaks in most buildings and the smallest spray foam insulation job we quote. Cold floors on the ground storey are frequently this strip of missing insulation and nothing else.
A floor with outside air underneath it behaves nothing like a floor with a heated room underneath it.
Batt in that cavity sags away from the subfloor over time, and the air gap it leaves is directly connected to the outside at the perimeter. The floor above is cold no matter what the label on the insulation said.
Spray foam insulation applied up tight to the underside of the subfloor stays in contact with it and seals the perimeter at the same time. It is one of the most obvious before-and-after differences we install. See our garage insulation page for the rest of it.
Open framing is the cheapest opportunity anyone gets, and it does not come back.
New Brunswick sits in climate zone 6, and current energy provisions push hard on both insulation levels and airtightness. Spray foam insulation is an air barrier as installed, which means the airtightness result is built in rather than chased afterwards with tape and caulk by somebody else's trade.
The scheduling matters more than the insulation. Spray foam insulation goes in after rough-in and before boarding, and if that window gets missed the whole trade sequence stalls. We book against the framing schedule, not against a date somebody picked in advance. See our new construction insulation page for how we schedule around a build.
Worth knowing before you commit to any insulation work, because the amounts are not small and most people we speak to have not looked them up.
The Total Home Energy Savings Program, run through NB Power, pays per square foot of insulation added. Attics run from about $0.40 a square foot at R-15 added up to about $0.85 at R-60. Basement and crawl space walls run from about $1.00 at R-10 added to about $2.00 at R-30. The basement header, the strip of framing described above, pays between about $1.00 and $3.00.
There are conditions. It is homeowners, on a property of three storeys or less. You need an energy evaluation by an approved energy advisor before the work and another one after it. You have to treat at least twenty percent of the area of whatever component you are insulating. Work has to be finished within nine months of the first evaluation, and you need the receipts.
Book the first evaluation before the spray foam insulation goes in, not after. Insulation installed beforehand does not count, and that is the single most common way people lose the money.
Amounts and rules change. Check the current terms with the program directly rather than taking a spray foam insulation contractor's word for it, including ours.
A side effect of spray foam insulation rather than a reason for it, but a real one on an exposed coastal site.
In 1992 the NAHB Research Center measured racking resistance on wood stud walls before and after three inches of closed cell spray foam insulation. The vinyl clad assembly went from 913 pounds to 2,800. The plywood clad one went from 2,890 to 5,300.
University of Florida testing under ASTM E 330 put roof deck uplift resistance at roughly 75 pounds per square foot untreated, and around 250 after a three inch fill application.
Nobody buys spray foam insulation for this. It is worth knowing about on a shore that gets what this one gets.
Spray foam insulation burns, so anywhere people actually spend time it has to sit behind a thermal barrier. Half inch gypsum board is the assembly everybody accepts.
Attic and crawl space insulation is treated differently, because nobody occupies those spaces. There, a tested ignition barrier of lesser thickness will usually satisfy the requirement.
Which of the two applies to your building, and who is responsible for installing it, goes on the quote. Discovering that afterwards costs money, and it happens to people regularly.
The two components have to meet in the correct ratio at the correct temperature. When they do not, the result is off-ratio spray foam insulation, and it does not recover.
The signs are a lasting chemical smell weeks after the job, spray foam insulation that is crumbly or brittle rather than firm, discolouration, the insulation pulling back from the framing and reopening the gap it was meant to close, or cracking that shows up within days.
The commonest cause is spraying onto a substrate that was too cold. Product minimums are for the surface, not the room, and the surface is almost always colder.
It cannot be sprayed over. It has to come off mechanically, back to clean framing, before anything new goes on. We do that work, including where somebody else did the original. See our insulation removal and replacement page for how that work is done.
A room over a garage or a porch that never warms up is nearly always an insulation problem rather than a heating problem.
Ice builds at the same section of eaves two winters running when heat is escaping into the attic.
A draft moves along the bottom of a wall on a windy day, particularly on the harbour side, because the insulation behind it seals nothing.
A cellar smells different in August than it does in February when damp air is moving through it.
Frost, or the brown staining it leaves behind, shows up on the sheathing above the attic insulation when warm air is leaking upward.
Any of those signs is worth a spray foam insulation assessment. None of them can be diagnosed accurately from the ground.
We do not publish per-foot figures, because the honest answer is that four jobs of identical area can differ by a wide margin and a number on a web page helps nobody.
What actually moves it: which product the space requires, the depth the target calls for, how much preparation and masking the space needs before anyone can spray, whether existing material has to come out first, and access. A crawl space you enter on your stomach costs more than a full-height cellar of the same area, and it always will.
What you get is one visit, measurements taken, substrate temperature read, and a written specification with the insulation, the depth and one fixed figure on it. That figure does not move afterwards.
Estimates are free, across the city and the surrounding towns; reach us through the contact page to book one.
Saint John's coastal Atlantic climate is only one version of the conditions a crew plans around, and it helps to see how others handle their own local weather. spray foam insulation in Windsor deals with a humid Great Lakes climate very different from Saint John's salt air. insulation services contractors in Bradford face a colder, drier inland winter. Caledon attic insulation specialists plan around an escarpment climate with its own local wrinkles. spray foam contractors services in Cape Breton work another Atlantic coastal climate with a harsher winter again. Every one of these climates asks a slightly different question of the same material.
Half an hour to an hour on site. Measurements, an inspection of whatever insulation is already there, a damp check on the substrate, and a conversation about what the space genuinely requires. The written price follows within a day or two.
On the day, the crew masks everything that is not being sprayed, sets up ventilation, and gets the space and the insulation to working temperature. That preparation is a real part of the day and it is not padding.
Spraying itself is fast. Most residential work is one day. Large or awkward spaces run to two.
Spray foam insulation is tack free in minutes and fully cured well before the crew leaves. The space needs to stay empty during the spray and for the re-entry window afterwards, which we give you in writing beforehand rather than on the day.
Then it gets trimmed back flush where anything is going over it, the masking comes out, and the space is left swept.
We install spray foam insulation everywhere inside the city line, from the peninsula and the North End through Millidgeville and the west side, out to Forest Hills, Red Head and Lorneville.
Past it, the valley towns of Rothesay, Quispamsis and Hampton, plus Grand Bay-Westfield, and east along the shore to St. Martins.
Out-of-the-way rural insulation jobs are routine. Nothing extra gets added for travel inside that area.
We do one assessment, write one insulation specification, and give you one number that holds. Call +1 506-300-4863.
The insulation does not settle, sag or break down, and it has no service life in the way a mechanical system does. Installed correctly, spray foam insulation lasts as long as the structure holds it. The failures we get called to are installation failures that showed up in the first weeks, not material wearing out over decades.
It changes how the building has to be ventilated, and that is a real consideration rather than a marketing objection. A building behind continuous spray foam insulation needs deliberate mechanical ventilation instead of relying on leaks. The difference is that you control it, you can filter it, and it is not dragging fog-belt humidity through the wall assembly on the way in. We flag it when a job is going to take a building into that territory.
Not over batt or loose fill, no. Spray foam insulation needs to bond to a solid substrate, and insulation with air in it is not one. The old insulation comes out first. On a bare masonry wall or a clean roof deck it goes straight on.
Only the area being insulated, plus the re-entry window afterwards. For attic or cellar insulation that usually means the rest of the house carries on normally. We give you the actual window in writing before the day so you can plan around it rather than find out on the morning.
Almost always the top of the building and the rim joist, in that order. Warm air leaves at the top, and a tall house here draws hard. Spray foam insulation on the ceiling plane and the band of framing at the floor perimeter usually gives more comfort per dollar than any other insulation available, and it is often what we recommend even when it means a smaller job for us.
Tell us the type of space, the approximate size, whether anything heats it today, and what the insulation in it is failing to do. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 506-300-4863.
