Saint John Spray Foam Insulation
Saint John, New Brunswick ยท across Greater Saint John
Saint John Spray Foam Insulation works on houses and buildings across the city and the surrounding towns. Most people who call us have already tried adding insulation once and did not get what they paid for. We are certified applicators, we price the job in writing, and the figure we hand you is the figure you pay.
Foam 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 foam 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 is going wrong with it. Or call +1 506-300-4863.
We are certified applicators. Material has to meet CAN/ULC S705.1 and the installation has to meet CAN/ULC S705.2, and those are two different standards for a reason. Good material installed badly is still a failed job.
We read the substrate temperature before the gun comes out, not the air temperature. Foam sprayed onto a surface below the product's minimum shrinks and lets go, and the surface is usually colder than the room.
When foam 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.
One visit, one written specification, one price. No number changes after the fact.
Every space gets specified against its own conditions. There is no default depth here.
No single surface on a building loses more heat than the one over your head, and none is cheaper to put right. 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 alone 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 it gets ignored. The floor above it is cold, the air in it moves up into the house, and almost nobody has looked at it in years.
View Crawl Space Insulation
Two separate problems get called garage insulation. 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 at a building envelope, and it lasts a few weeks. Everything after boarding is more expensive and less effective.
View New Construction Insulation
Similar rigs, similar guns, two materials whose behaviour diverges enough that picking the wrong one is a failure rather than a trade-off.
View Closed Cell and Open Cell Spray Foam
Two reasons material comes out. Either it has failed on its own over decades, or somebody installed foam 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, not conduction, and closing the air path is what evens them out.
Heating equipment runs shorter cycles 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 foam is its own vapour control at sufficient thickness, so no separate poly layer is needed against a foundation wall.
It 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 product that suits it, including the times that means the cheaper one.
Batt and loose fill resist heat travelling through them. Neither one stops air travelling around them.
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. At the perimeter of every floor.
Add a foot of loose fill over an unsealed ceiling and you have insulated the leaks. You have not closed them.
Foam 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 a building here different from the same building 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. 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 does nothing about either one. Sealing the openings does. This is the single strongest argument for foam in this city, and it has almost nothing to do with R-value.
The second thing worth knowing about the local building stock.
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. 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 inside the walls as well.
Sealing the top of a building like that changes more than sealing the middle of it. It is worth knowing before you decide where to spend.
Closed cell comes out dense and hard. Around R-6 to R-7 an inch, 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 and stays soft. 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 product before seeing the space is quoting from a price list, not writing a specification.
Two 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 is cheaper and it works.
Bringing the attic inside means foam 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.
Below-grade space is where the fog-belt problem does its damage.
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 goes straight onto the wall. No stud bay behind it, no cavity to hold moist air, no absorbent material 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 treatment 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.
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.
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 it is often stuffed with a scrap of batt and nothing else.
It is one of the largest single air leaks in most buildings and one of the smallest jobs to fix. Cold floors on the ground storey are frequently this 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.
Foam 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.
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. Foam 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 product. Foam 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.
Worth knowing before you commit to anything, 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 a Certified 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 we start, not after. Work done 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 contractor's word for it, including ours.
A side effect rather than a reason, 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. 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 insulates a building for this. It is worth knowing about on a shore that gets what this one gets.
The material burns, so anywhere people actually spend time it has to sit behind a thermal barrier. Half inch gypsum board is the assembly everybody accepts.
Attics and crawl spaces are treated differently, because nobody occupies them. 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 foam, and it does not recover.
The signs are a lasting chemical smell weeks after the job, foam that is crumbly or brittle rather than firm, discolouration, foam 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.
A room over a garage or a porch that never warms up.
Ice building at the same section of eaves two winters running.
A draught at the bottom of a wall on a windy day, particularly on the harbour side.
A cellar that smells different in August than it does in February.
Frost, or the brown staining it leaves behind, on the sheathing above the attic insulation.
Any of those is worth a look. None of them is 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 product, the depth and one fixed figure on it. That figure does not move afterwards.
Estimates are free, across the city and the surrounding towns.
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 product 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.
Foam 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.
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 properties are routine. Nothing extra gets added for travel inside that area.
One assessment, one specification, one number that holds. Ring +1 506-300-4863.
It does not settle, sag or break down, and it has no service life in the way a mechanical system does. Installed correctly it 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. An airtight building 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. Foam needs to bond to a solid substrate, and material with air in it is not one. Old material comes out first. On a bare masonry wall or a clean roof deck it goes straight on.
Only the area being worked in, plus the re-entry window afterwards. For an attic or a cellar 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. Sealing the ceiling plane and the band of framing at the floor perimeter usually gives more comfort per dollar than any other work available, and it is often what we recommend even when it means a smaller job for us.
Type of space, approximate size, whether anything heats it today, and the problem you want solved. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 506-300-4863.
