Hi, I am Robert Naini, your Spray Foam Advisor, and “The Guy in the Hawaiian Shirt”.
I wear the Hawaiian Shirt as a symbol of freedom and flexibility, something that all business owners should want.
And one of my goals is to help 100 Spray Foam business owners set up their business in a way that gets them freedom and flexibility.
This includes providing spray foam training, education, tips & tricks, business fundamentals and coaching or consulting services.
In this video, I want to share with you my thought process on open cell vs closed cell foam and where to use each.
Now, we know that both open cell and closed cell foam work, right? The question is where you use them and how you use them to get optimal performance, provide optimum efficiency and get the best results at the best price for your customer.
So, first and foremost let’s think about this in terms of the control layers that each of these materials provides.
Open cell foam provides insulation, or a thermal control layer, of course but it also provides an air barrier, and then closed cell foam also provides insulation and air barrier qualities but it can also achieve additional benefits including a vapor retarder and it can provide a drain plane, for example on the exterior of a building, so closed cell foam has more versatility than open cell foam.
But when you’re looking at applications on the inside of a structure, somewhere in the interior of a building, oftentimes open cell foam and closed cell foam are interchangeable, so you want to make sure that you’re using the right product that gives your client the best performance and the best bang for their buck in that specific application.
What do I mean by this, well for example, an application in the south, in Florida, where I live now, or in Texas, where I used to live, if you are going to install spray foam in the walls or in the attic, often open cell foam is going to provide the best bang for the buck.
Both spray foam types will have similar performance when installed at the same R-value, both materials are going to have air barrier properties and if they’re both going on the inside of a building you do not need the additional benefits of closed cell foam in the south.
Now when you start going further north, if you’re building in Wisconsin or Maine, now you’re going to need a vapor retarder on the interior of your insulation or on the same plane as your insulation, and you will likely be better off with a product like closed cell foam that provides all of this in one application.
Of course, you can use open cell foam in these northern climates but then you are most likely going to need a vapor retarder over the surface of the insulation – typically some type of coating or covering – and oftentimes that can be difficult and pricey, so it can be more beneficial to use a closed cell foam in these northern climate applications where a vapor retarder is needed.
Once you go beyond interior applications and start looking at exterior applications or specialty applications closed cell foam is going to be your default choice and may be your only option.
If you are working on a commercial project and you want to do exterior continuous insulation, you’re only going to use closed cell foam in that application open cell foam is not approved to be used in exterior applications or to come in contact with bulk water.
If you’re going to apply insulation below grade, or you want to install insulation against a basement wall, either on the interior or the exterior, I would recommend closed cell foam only for those applications.
Not every product does everything, so we need to know the differences between open cell and closed cell foam to know where we can use them versus where we shouldn’t use them.
Some of the limitations for open cell foam is that it doesn’t provide a vapor retarder, as I mentioned before, so it’s not going to achieve less than one perm, and open cell foam is also not intended for contact with bulk water, so anytime that’s a design parameter like floatation foam or exterior applications we’re going to look at some type of closed cell foam or higher density material to achieve the properties we need.
If you found this video helpful then it would probably be valuable to your friends in the spray foam industry, so help us all out and send it to three or four people that you know.
Additionally, if you have any questions, want info on a specific topic, or want to learn how Spray Foam Advisor might be able to help you or your business, you can email us at [email protected].
This is Robert Naini, your Spray Foam Advisor, and “The Guy in the Hawaiian Shirt”, thanks for checking this out and catch me on some more videos.
