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.
Adding another layer of insulation over an unsealed ceiling does not close the openings. Spray foam insulation does, because it is applied wet and hardens in the opening itself.
Call +1 506-300-4863 and we will get up there and look properly.
The vented approach keeps the attic cold. Openings through the ceiling below are closed off one by one, and the insulation then sits on top of a sealed plane. Uncomplicated roofs with an empty attic above them usually want this, and it is the cheaper of the two spray foam insulation routes.
The unvented approach moves the boundary up to the roof itself. Spray foam insulation is applied against the sheathing, carried up the gables, and the vents are closed permanently.
Choose unvented when mechanical equipment or ductwork lives up there, when dormers and valleys break the attic into compartments nobody can crawl between, when a finished room has dead space behind its knee walls, or when the same length of eave ices up winter after winter.
That spray foam insulation call gets made from inside the attic, not from the driveway.
Warm indoor air carries moisture. When it leaks up through the ceiling into a cold vented attic it cools, and the moisture comes out of it onto the first cold surface available, which is the underside of the roof sheathing.
On a coastal site the outside air is not doing you any favours either. It arrives already close to saturated for much of the year, so the attic has less capacity to dry than it would inland.
Frost on the sheathing, damp staining on the nail points, or a musty smell when the hatch comes off are all the same story: air is getting up there that should not be.
Spray foam insulation across the ceiling plane fixes it. Insulation depth on its own does not.
People blame the gutters. The actual sequence is that heat leaking into the attic thaws snow partway up the slope, the meltwater travels down to the overhang, which has no heat under it, and refreezes. The dam thickens, and eventually water finds its way back up beneath the shingle courses.
Insulation depth alone will not reliably stop it, because what drives it is leaking air rather than heat conducted through the ceiling. Take the heat away, either by sealing the plane below or by moving the spray foam insulation up to the sheathing, and the cycle has nothing to feed on.
Ice forming at the same spot in consecutive winters is a symptom, not bad luck.
You get around R-6 to R-7 an inch out of closed cell spray foam insulation, drifting down toward R-6.5 over the years. Open cell insulation delivers around R-3.5 to R-3.8.
Zone 6 targets are not lenient. Between the number you have to reach and the depth the space physically allows, the specification writes itself; it does not start from a thickness somebody picked in advance.
Attic work is also the best paid line in the provincial rebate schedule, running from around $0.40 a square foot at R-15 added up to around $0.85 at R-60. That threshold is worth knowing before you settle on a depth, because a small change can move which band you land in. Book the energy evaluation before we start.
We will not quote an assembly R-value without telling you the depth it assumes.
Somebody gets into the attic, measures the existing depth, and inspects the sheathing overhead for damp. Only then does anyone talk about money.
See every part of a building we insulate on the home page.
Call +1 506-300-4863 and we will sort out a time.
We install spray foam insulation on roofs, foundations, floors, outbuildings and commercial decks throughout the region.
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 InsulationBook a spray foam insulation assessment. The space gets measured, the substrate gets read, and the insulation price you receive is the price you pay.
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.
