In today’s day and age, you have to be more than just a spray foam contractor.
It’s not enough just to be an insulation guy and be out there to sell and provide insulation to the market.
You are fundamentally changing the way building envelopes work, so you have to know a little bit about that.
That is one of the reasons why we talk so much about building science here at spray foam advisor.
It’s important for you to know that when you do something to the building like create an unvented attic and change the way that air and heat flow you are changing the building physics and dynamics of that structure.
When you work with a product like closed cell foam insulation, you know that it can address many of these building envelope attributes, and you have to be aware of how the building is going to be affected when you are done.
To understand these concepts, we need to study building science and one of the key concepts from building science is understanding flow or how things flow.
This is a basic physics concept, things flow from high concentration to low concentration, from high heat to low heat, from high pressure to low pressure.
All things flow from high to low, you see this naturally occur when you see a group of people that is trying to disperse, they flow from high concentration of people to low concentration as they disperse.
This is a natural occurrence.
When you know that things flow from high to low, then you know that to minimize the risk of bulk liquid flow into a structure we need to put a barrier in place that will resist bulk liquid flow and prevent bulk liquid on the exterior of the building from getting into the structure. This is where we learn about control layers.
What do we see in real world construction applications? Typically, we see this in the form of a drain plane on the exterior of the building envelope, this could be a building wrap or some type of skin that protects the building, a material that diverts bulk liquid away from the structure.
For example, when we install closed cell foam on the exterior of buildings, we are providing that bulk liquid drain plane with closed cell foam in that application.
The next control layer is the air barrier.
When air flows it brings contaminants with it, heat, moisture, allergens and pollutants.
We want to minimize the air flow from the exterior to the interior, so we put an air barrier in the assembly.
The next control layer is the thermal boundary, or the insulation layer.
We put that in place to minimize heat flow, to create more efficient structures and to have lower heat loads.
The fourth and final control layer is the vapor control layer.
The vapor control layer addresses moisture vapor in the air, it helps reduce vapor drive, and the combination of the insulation and the vapor control layer helps control condensation points through an assembly.
This can also help you determine and calculate where a condensation point might occur.
When these systems are constructed properly, we can create structures that work.
Structures that flat out work long term, over time, and we have excellent structures because of that.
The ultimate example in the spray foam industry is using closed cell foam, as I’ve mentioned, on the exterior of a building.
This provides multiple control layers in one application, where we provide a drain plane, a vapor retarder, an insulation, and an air barrier all in a single application on the exterior of a structure.
This protects the structure from the impact of the elements on the outside of the building.
We create a better system, and the structure will operate better over the long term by moving all of these control layers to the exterior of the structure, or the exterior of the building envelope.
Of course, we can’t forget a proper air management system, the HVAC contractor, the mechanical contractor, has to do his job properly and design a system for the building envelope that you’ve constructed.
All of this has been to point out that your job is more than just insulation. You have to be a performance contractor, you have to be a building envelope expert, you have to be familiar with building science and aware of how what you are doing is going to change the structure so you can educate your customers and work with the HVAC contractor on the project, so the building works effectively and efficiently over time, to get the best result for the end customer because that is your goal.
