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.
The second one is more common than the industry likes to admit, and it cannot be corrected by spraying over it.
Call +1 506-300-4863 if something is not right.
The two components have to meet in the correct ratio, at the correct temperature, through equipment that is working properly. When any of that is wrong the result is off-ratio spray foam insulation.
The signs are a chemical smell that is still there weeks or months after the job, spray foam insulation that is crumbly or brittle rather than firm and resilient, discolouration, spray foam insulation that has pulled back from the framing, sometimes half an inch or more, reopening the exact gap it was installed to close, and cracking within days or weeks.
The most frequent cause is spraying onto a substrate that was too cold. Product minimums refer to the surface, not the room, and on a damp coastal winter day the surface is a long way below the air.
It cannot be sprayed over and it will not improve. It has to come off, back to clean framing, and that is the whole of the remedy.
Decades-old material comes out for different reasons. It settles and loses depth. It gets contaminated. It has often been disturbed by rodents, and in an older building it frequently has been.
There is also no point spraying over it. Spray foam insulation needs to bond to a solid substrate and material with air in it is not one.
Removal is contained, bagged and taken away, and the surface underneath gets inspected before anything new goes on. That inspection is worth having on its own. It is often the first look anybody has had at the sheathing or the framing in fifty years.
Damp staining on the underside of the roof deck usually points to an air leak from below rather than a roof leak.
Knob and tube wiring changes what can legally be buried, and needs an electrician before we go any further.
Rot shows up at the rim joist or at the wall plate.
Old chimney chases sometimes run open from the cellar to the roof, which in a balloon framed house is a straight vertical air path through the whole building.
We stop and tell you rather than covering it up. Spray foam insulation over a problem makes the problem harder to reach later.
Once the surface is clean and sound, the new specification is written against the space as it actually is, not as it was assumed to be before anything came out.
Where the original problem was a bad spray foam insulation job, we will tell you plainly what went wrong with it. You are entitled to know, particularly if there is a warranty conversation to be had with whoever did it.
Send a photograph if you can. Failed spray foam insulation is often recognisable from one.
See everything else we install across Saint John on the home page.
Call +1 506-300-4863.
We install spray foam insulation on roofs, foundations, floors, outbuildings and commercial decks throughout the region.
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
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.
