When to Apply Spray Foam in the Home


A modern house or building has a number of utilities and hardware pieces that make it a comfortable and practical place to live or work. This ranges from a solid and leak-proof roof to the heating and cooling units to the electric wiring in the wall to the plumbing and sewer main. Meanwhile, a less glamorous but no less important part of the house is the spray foam insulation found in the walls and attic. Most houses and buildings are built with spray foam in them, but sometimes, spray foam may get worn out or damaged over time. Thin or missing spray foam can be a real problem, so a homeowner may fine some spray foam insulation equipment for sale online or at a local hardware store. Such spray foam insulation equipment for sale may include the spray guns, color-coded nozzles, chemical bottles, and more. Larger jobs, meanwhile, may call for a spray foam business and entire crews with a large spray foam rig to offer. This may be done when an office building or hotel is being constructed, for example.

Spray Foam in Relation to the Electric Bill

Newer homeowners may not realize it, but the spray foam in their house’s attic and walls has a close relationship with the house’s electric bill. Why is that? Spray foam is the hardware responsible for maintaining the house’s insulation and regulating the loss of warm or cold air. With proper insulation in place, a house won’t leak any warm air in winter or lose its cool air in summer. In turn, this means that the air conditioning and heating systems aren’t being overworked, since the house’s climate control is stable. But if the house has thin or missing insulation or drafty windows and doors, it may lose a lot of warm or cool air and the HVAC system will have to work overtime to make up for the constant loss. That, meanwhile, drives up the electric bill in a hurry. A typical house devotes nearly 50% of its energy to its heating and cooling needs, so an overworked system will be expensive to own. This can be fixed when the homeowner finds spray foam insulation equipment for sale and gets their drafty windows and doors replaced.

Get the Job Done

A homeowner who feels confident about their home repair skills can find spray foam insulation equipment for sale either at a local hardware store or online if they can’t find a local supplier. This may include the spray foam gun itself, not to mention the chemical bottles that supply them during work. Spray foam users may also get color-coded nozzles that will become a distinctive color if the air is too cold for safe spray foam work. This helps prevent spray foam users from wasting foam in unfavorable conditions.

How can spray foam be installed? This is easy up in the attic, where there is plenty of room to operate and apply spray foam directly to the attic’s wooden surfaces. For the walls, though, some extra steps are required. Spray foam does not directly go on the drywall or on the house’s siding on the outside. Rather, spray foam is applied to the surfaces inside the wall, and that means cutting it open. A homeowner may cut open a square or rectangle right into their drywall, and this gives them total access to the wall’s interior for work. This is useful not only for spray foam work, but also plumbing repair and electrical wire inspections. Once this hole is made, the homeowner may spray foam to the wall’s surfaces as needed.

For convenience, a homeowner may create what is called an access panel in their wall. This is when they cut away a section of drywall and then attach fasteners that allow that drywall section to be opened and closed like a vertical trap door. This arrangement allows the homeowner to repeatedly visit the inside of their wall without having to cut open a hole and re-seal it every single time. Larger spray foam jobs for a construction site, meanwhile, call for an entire spray foam company that will send a crew with a large, truck-mounted rig for industrial-scale spray foam application.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *