Spray foam insulation

I’ve booked Great Northern Insulation for my spray foam installation. The north wall of the house has to be fire rated and the city inspector does not allow me to put any kind of spray foam in that wall unless I have engineer stamped drawing. For the east, west and south side wall of the house, I’m spraying 1.5″ of foam to seal the wall. Then I will fill the rest of the wall cavity with Roxul mineral wool insulation. Since steel is not combustible, all the steel beams including the ones on the north wall will have the beam pocket sprayed to minimize thermal bridging. On the 3rd floor the east, west and south side wall will be filled with spray foam since the wall there is thinner than the rest of the house. And the entire roof including the one on the 3rd floor will be spray foamed. All the rim joists will be sprayed foamed and the basement wall will be spray foamed.

The produce they are using is BASF WALLTITE ECO or the purple foam insulation that you see in all those home improvement shows you see on HDTV.

With half day of work, they have finished spraying the 3rd floor. Here’s all wall cavity on the 3rd floor. As you can see the entire 2×6 wall cavity filled. with foam insulation.

This is the west side wall. With 5.5″ thick wall filled with spray foam, based o the BASF’s technical data sheet, the initial thermal resistance value is expected to be around R40 and long term value is expected to be around R33. The Ontario Build Code minimum wall insulation value is R24 and R24 is what’s being done to just about all the new homes that’s being built today. Keep in mind, that R24 is initial thermal resistance value. The commonly used fiberglass insulation loses its R value very quickly. The long term thermal resistance of a R24 fiberglass insulation is often around R14. This means on the 3rd floor, my house is expected to have more than double the insulation performance in the long run.

On the ceiling, there’s a bit less than 6″ of spray foam applied.

On the north wall, the steel beam pocket is filled.

Unfortunately on the first day of spray foam installation we had to stop the spraying for an ESA inspection. So I lost half day of spray foam installation and unlikely to get it completed according to the schedule.