Why Spray Foam Insulation is Beneficial for Your Home

Learn the Benefits of Using Spray Foam Insulation in Your Home

We’re actually in an attic in a custom home that we’re building right now, and I want to show you the spray foam installation that’s been installed and share with you how that can benefit your home and show you what it looks like after the installation’s complete.

Looking Inside the Attic

I want to get you oriented to what we’re actually looking at inside the attic. So out in front of us, we have trusses and spray foam. You can see a truss right here, a truss over here, and you got another truss here. These are two feet on center, and we have way out there; you can see an HVAC duct. This truss is running down to an outside plate that’s down there, the top plate for the wall, and then this spray foam is sprayed against the roof sheathing, and it runs all the way up to a ridge that’s right above me here. So right where this wood goes in, that’s the ridge. And when you look out here, you can see how this ridge starts sloping back down again, and it’s taking off, and it’s going back down to the other wall on the other side of the house.

R20 Spray Foam Insulation Around the Gable Trusses

You can see the trusses here as it continues down. And then it goes to nothing until it hits that wall on the other side. On this end, what you’re seeing over here is that we have a gable end, so this is the actual end of the house out here. This is the gable end truss, and on that truss, you have spray foam that goes all the way down to the plate on the outside wall. And that’s what you’re seeing right down here, in front of me here. So, that’s the actual drywall, and then you can see the plate, and then there’s the spray foam. That spray foam is actually an R20, has an R20 value, and it’s five and a half inches thick. So, you get about three and a half R-value per inch on this.

Spray Foam for Ceiling Insulation

On the ceiling, this is actually eight and a half inches thick; you’ll get an R30 out of this. And it’s open cell spray foam that you’re seeing here. The air infiltration is greatly reduced when you have this because the air does not move through this. So, that’s another benefit of having this. You can thicken this up too, and get an R38 and go as far as you want to go with it, but it actually reduces the headspace you have inside of the attic as you do that.

Benefits of Spray Foam Insulation for HVAC

The other benefit is that you can see drywall down here if you look down. So, the drywall and all of the plumbing are completely exposed. And I’ll go over here; you can see a few different things. The orange pipe here is fire sprinklers. These are water lines. You got electrical running here. If you come up here, you actually see the HVAC ducting that’s right there. So the HVAC ducts, you can see all those as well. And the benefit of this is it’s all inside conditioned space. So hot and cold water lines are getting less heat or cold on them. The HVAC ducting is a manageable load. It’s not getting as hot as cold either, so it works more efficiently. We can, a lot of times, downsize the system because we have less load on that. So you can see the actual furnace that’s sitting, this is the air handler, it’s sitting over there, right there. And the furnace, the condenser for the AC, is actually outside. So these are all benefits that we have.

Health Benefits of Spray Foam

The other thing is that I’m in this attic right now, and no fiberglass insulation is flying around. I’m not coughing. I’m not getting it in my skin, it’s a lot easier to work in, from the standpoint of doing repairs, or if you’re making a modification in your attic, you can see all this as you go around, all the HVAC ducting. So, tons of benefits of it. You also have to ensure you have a dehumidifier inside the attic space. So even though it’s a semi-conditioned space, it needs to have some airflow moving around, so we’ll put some ducts in here for the dehumidifier and then plumb that in, so the condensate will go out of the house. So, there are a lot of things you could do with the spray foam insulation, and it gives a real good superior product as far as your home’s performance and energy consumption.

Contact Freeman's Construction Inc

All right, well, I hope you learned something today about spray foam insulation. Feel free to contact us if you’d like more information about custom homes, ADUs, or doing a whole house remodeling project. You can go to our website at freemansconstruction.com. We have a ton of information there at our resources tab. Go through there on pricing, on floor plans, you name it, it’s there. There’s a very comprehensive FAQ area you can get to answer a ton of your questions. All right, thanks for joining us and have an excellent rest of your day.