Learn Insulation in an Hour: Part 1

Think a few bright cans from the home store can turn your attic into an energy fortress? We’ve seen the memes and the mishaps, so we brought in Rich Brown from Prime Energy Group to lay out the real story on spray foam—what it is, where it shines, and why the installer matters as much as the material. From the first pass of the spray gun to the final trim before drywall, we unpack what separates a reliable air-sealed envelope from an expensive mess.

We start by demystifying open cell and closed cell polyurethane foams. Rich explains how open cell’s rapid expansion and soft, breathable structure conforms without shoving pipes or bowing window frames, while closed cell’s dense, higher R-value per inch brings muscle for tight spots but needs careful placement. Then we tackle the big myth: that canned foam can insulate a whole wall. Between unpredictable expansion, moisture traps over fiberglass, and certification gaps for large residential coverage, DIY approaches often cost more and deliver less. Rich shares jaw-dropping numbers from homeowners who spent thousands on kits only to cover a fraction of the area a pro crew could handle for less.

Performance and payback take center stage. When insulation doubles as an air barrier, conductive, convective, and radiant heat flows are all slowed, rooms over garages stop baking, and drafts disappear. That tighter envelope lets you right-size HVAC—moving from the old 600 square feet per ton rule toward 900–1,000—shrinking upfront equipment costs and slashing monthly bills by 30–50 percent. We also cover installation timelines, why dual-gun rigs speed complex jobs, and how foam can reduce or eliminate costly framing tweaks common with fiberglass, flipping the math for production and custom builders alike.

Durability and safety round it out. Expect lifetime-of-structure warranties with transferability, stable performance years later, and a clear 24-hour reentry window guided by the American Chemistry Council to keep indoor air quality pristine after cure. If you’ve ever wrestled a stuck window from high-expansion foam, wondered whether spray foam harms wiring, or questioned how long it lasts, this conversation gives straight answers and practical guardrails. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s planning a build or renovation, and drop your toughest insulation question so we can tackle it in part two.

Transcript

DIY Foam Fails And A Pro Joins

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Carolina Contractor Show with your host, General Contractor Donnie Blanchard. Hey Donnie, have you seen those videos of people taking canned spray foam and like insulating their own tool shed or even their attic? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Lots of um attempts and failures at that.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Have you ever seen that in real life? Someone who's done that? Oh, absolutely. I think people in the name of trying to save money, and the key word there is trying to save money, um, that you know, a lot of people give that a whirl and wish they would have called the big boys in.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Right, exactly. But I think what it points out is people see spray foam done by a professional company and they think, oh, I can do that with the stuff in a can, but it takes talent. But it also means that people realize more than ever that it's a legit insulation choice. And so what we decide to do today on the Carolina contractors, jump right into it, is to get a pro who knows something about it. So I will, Donnie, give you the honors of introducing our pro on the show today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Yes, it is totally my honor to introduce Rich Brown. He's with Prime Energy, and Rich has been doing all my houses since we connected uh a few years ago. And I don't want to put the pressure on you too much, Rich, but he's probably the best salesman across the board out of all the trades that I deal with. And this guy has forgot more than I'll ever know about insulation. So, you know, thank you for coming on. I know your time's very valuable, but man, you you really uh educate me every time we cross paths, and and hopefully uh you can do that to our listeners today.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Thanks, Donnie. I appreciate it. And uh thank you for the time to do this. It's always a pleasure to give people a chance to understand something that they've seen little bits of here and there, but don't have it all put together.

What Spray Foam Really Is

SPEAKER_02 1:44

All right, Rich. We started off with the example of the can of spray foam and people in a DIY application. Some people have even drilled holes in the side of their house and tried to do it. Um, there's obviously a difference, but what is spray foam insulation for the newbie?

Why Canned Foam Backfires In Walls

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Spray foam insulation is polyurethane foam, and there's two different types, open cell and closed cell. The short answer of what the difference is open cell is water-based, and the cells are open, like you'd like it sound. The um closed cell is solvent-based, and it uses a refrigerant gas to blow those bubbles and lock it in there. So it has a higher R value, but there are pluses and minuses for both of those things. What people are using in the little cans is a one-part polyurethane that doesn't have a chemical reaction. It just has a physical reaction of swelling up a little bit and making bubbles in it. And according to which kind they're using, they can do things like moving their utilities around, moving their electrical boxes around, um, things like that. And what people think is going to be savings ends up being more expensive, anyways, because in OpenCell, for instance, it expands at a rate of 100 to 1 in seven seconds. And you take that stuff out of the can and it'll expand four to one, five to one. Um, and and even that not predictably because it changes with temperature of with outdoor temperature, with temperature of the substrate. And so they're doing something that they're thinking, well, you know, it's only seven dollars a can, but they're gonna end up using thousands, potentially thousands of cans to do things right. And the other, the other kind of mistakes they can make is when they drill a hole in a wall and try to just stick it in there with the fiberglass that's already there, then they combine an air permeable fiberglass insulation with an air impermeable foam insulation. And so what that means is that warm, moist air gets in there and begins condensing, but the foam won't let it get out. So you're almost guaranteed to have a mold problem caused by that. Along with that, now if they're doing their their little workshop this way, it might work out just fine. But the stuff that comes in a can is also not certified to be put in a residence in North Carolina. The Department of Insurance is is very fussy about that. Um, those cans have different properties. They haven't been through the proper testing to find out whether they're combustible or not. They haven't been through the proper testing to find out if you put 8,000 board feet of in your in your home, what are you going to be inhaling? So those those are all the mystery kind of things. Now, you can also go online and buy things in two cans that look like propane canisters, and those are very similar to the foam that we spray, but again, very expensive. You're looking at$350 to get maybe uh a five by eight square foot area of a house sprayed. And I did have a customer that brought me in and wanted me to spray under the house. And when I got under there, there was about a 15 by 20 area sprayed. And he told me he had gotten those, you know, cans online and stuff. And I said, What have you spent so far? He said, about$8,000. And when I came back out from under there and handed him a quote for$3,800 to do the whole rest of the house, that was when that was when the reality really hit him. Um and his wife, his wife was in the other room going, I told you.

Cost Shock: DIY Vs Pro Numbers

SPEAKER_00 6:07

I think that, hey, I want to jump in and say that's probably why we hooked up and have had such a such a successful run over these last few years because I was shocked. And of course, Rich flipped me from close sale to open sale and and just really explained it in a way I'd never heard it before and and shined a new light on on the open sale. So I'm I'm an open sale guy now, but I was just amazed at at the affordability. And basically the way that they can afford to do this is not all insulation companies are created the same. And Rich Rich is part of a big outfit. You know, he um he has some amazing folks that work for him, and they have uh big they have the big sprayers, so they can do what most smaller companies can do in about a third of the time. Is that I don't know if that's a fair number, Rich, but uh on the first particular job we did together, that was about it. It was gonna take them about two weeks, and it took you about three or four days.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah, it was four days, and that's and we kind of cheat. We our trucks are set up with two full foam rigs. So right there, I'm getting double the production that a lot of my competitors do. Um, and it allows us to really dig into some difficult jobs because one guy can have a gun working on the really difficult, tight, nitpicky stuff, while the other guy's just moving along doing those eight or nine foot walls, you know, at at seven or eight seconds per bay. And it just the whole thing comes together in a way that lets us that really lets us save time. If your whole crew is taken up on that nitpicky stuff for, you know, a day and a half, nothing else is happening. Yeah. And so that is that is kind of an unfair advantage that we get our rigs built that way. That being said, I've also got several guys that have worked for me since 2007. That makes a difference.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Yeah, we've talked about people on Donnie's crew that he's had for years and years, and that makes a huge difference when you have loyalty, and it means you're treating your employees well and they like to do it, and that's a huge plus. Uh about how long does spray foam insulation last in the average home, Rich?

Speed, Crews, And Pro Equipment

SPEAKER_01 8:21

It is guaranteed for the life of the structure, not even the life of the homeowner. And for instance, in North Carolina, every consumer product has to have um a warranty. If it has a warranty, it has to be transferable once to another homeowner. This has the product that we happen to sell, has unlimited transferability from one owner to the next. And the reason for that is these, you know, the company, the Huntsman brands, have been out there for between 25 and 43 years. And they know there's no problem. As a matter of fact, Icinine at one point put out a hundred thousand dollar reward for anybody who could find a chemical that would melt this stuff. Nobody ever claimed the reward. If you if you make a mistake and and make foam inside your gun, you have to put it in a crock pot in glycol ether for like 48 hours and then still use pipe cleaners to get it out of all the little pathways.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

So you put up a wanted poster for this stuff to find a defect in it. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Yeah, to find somebody who could make it go away, who could, you know, so if you can't purposely make it go away, it's sure not going to do so on its own. And, you know, we've seen like this is I just hit 19 years selling this. And I've seen lots of the homes that we sprayed in 2007, eight, and nine, and nothing has changed. And they, you know, they're calling me back. In some cases, it's a new owner calling me back saying, hey, you my the people who sold me the house told me that you did the attic, I want you to come back and do the crawl, or that you did the room over garage, I want you to come back and do the rest of the attic. And when I get there, it looks essentially the same as the day we put it in.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yep, we always pitch it insulation upgrades as as a permanent upgrade. It doesn't, it's not something that that you have to do ever again. And um, I didn't realize that we had a a guarantee for the life of the structure, but that's a great selling point for you and I both. Um, that being said, it it lasts all these years and it's nothing to worry about. But my curiosity's always been about the first 24 hours. When you guys spray that that foam insulation, I know that you basically quarantine the house and you don't want me to have my homeowners back in for a spell, but but what's the main reason behind that? Or is it off-gassing or something like that? It's a combination of things.

Lifespan, Warranties, And Durability

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Not being able to be in the house while we spray is a physical danger. This stuff expands a rate of 100 to 1. And if you come wandering in where my guys are wearing a full respirator and Tyvek outfit and nitrile gloves, and this and you breathe this stuff in, it's gonna give you some trouble. It's gonna expand now. You're breathing a mist in that's tiny, but it's still gonna expand at 100 to 1 in there after you've breathed it in. And you're gonna be coughing it up for a while. So that's the physical danger. Then after we're done spraying, there's two different things to consider. The one that everybody's familiar with are VOCs, volatile organic compounds. And you hear about them on the news, and they talk about it with paints and all of those things. And they are they are compounds that can react with parts of your body. And especially open cell being water-based, it's closer to your water-based body. And but even more important, we stick with the American Chemistry Council's recommendation for that 24 hours. A lot of different manufacturers say, hey, if you provide X amount of ventilation, they can come back in four hours or six hours. Um we don't believe in that because the Chemistry Council actually has a bigger concern than VOCs. They're worried about the A-side of all of the foam, which is also the A-side of the carpet padding, the car upholstery, all of your furniture padding, and I don't know how many other things use that diazocyanate MDI chemical. And they're afraid that one day we're all going to be allergic to it. So they followed spray companies around and measured the air. And after 25, 24 hours, they had to move their equipment to parts per billion with a B to get a reading, and that's when they were satisfied that it was safe on a long term.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Um, Rich, my other question is kind of tied to it, aside from the VOCs, and I was thinking about when you buy those uh mattresses that are compressed and they come in a box this big and you cut it open and full-size mattress, but it says don't lay on this for like a day and a half because of VOCs. Um you were talking about spraying the foam and putting it in the bats and everything. Um is it just because it's a more detailed process that it takes longer to put in, also versus like standard rolled insulation? I guess they just kind of roll it out or blow it in so it can go faster. Um is that the main reason it takes longer?

SPEAKER_01 13:41

Yeah, because it seems like it should take a shorter time since we're spraying the liquid. But when they take a bat out of the bag and push it into the wall, and maybe even on a tall wall, use a stick to pop it in there. And they they even um fluff it a little bit and pop it to get it to sit nice in the cavity. But my guys start at the bottom and spray in a way that not only hits the the 15 and a half inch back of that cavity, but hits the three and a half inches worth of stud on both sides, all the way from the bottom to the top. It expands at a rate of 100 to one, and you have to soak everything. So there's different techniques, and uh the one that my guys prefer is to spray the middle and then picture frame it so that you make sure you've got a little triangle all the way around that center, expanding like a wedge, making it tight. And so, in doing that, it can take, it can take, even with my trucks with two spray guns, it can take about one and a half times the amount of time it takes to put in bad insulation. But it's also, and then of course, the other thing is they have to come back, especially in two by four walls, come back and cut it off to make sure that it's not in the way of the sheetrock.

Safety, Off‑Gassing, And The 24‑Hour Rule

SPEAKER_00 15:04

You know, I always wonder why they haven't made spray foam the only option. And I, and sort of like um with my roofing company, you know, three tab shingles were the thing until architecturals came out and got a better-looking shingle with a longer lifespan. It's just a no-brainer. It does cost a little more, but it lasts a lot longer. So um what's your take on that? How how come uh spray foam hasn't made bats and the other options obsolete already?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

The biggest the biggest reason for that is cost. And your custom builders aren't stuck on a few dollars, but production builders are. When they've got a a team of accountants thinking that if we save$26 on 10,000 homes, that's a whole lot of profit. And so to sell them on a 3,500 square foot home between foam and fiberglass, you might be looking at, you might be looking at something like$3,000,$2,500. And when they when those accountants start multiplying that by the number of homes they build nationally, their head spins.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

And and it's it it, you know, so it can be hard. And uh a few of the big builders have gotten awards for switching to all foam because they it just, you know, as far as green goes, you're looking at half the cost to heat and cool forever. You're looking at when you put fiberglass up under a floor, it's got about a five-year life cycle before it really stops working because it's already gotten in five years, it's been wet and dry 250 times or so. And when it gets wet, gravity pulls it away from the floor. And when it's not touching the floor, it's not doing its job. And it becomes a nice home for mice and raccoons because they're like, ooh, look at this.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Yeah, no, that's a great point, man. What my my big thing when you said three or four thousand, I think the last house, the only house that hasn't done spray foam in a while, um, it was a first-time homeowner, and it was about 2,000 square feet with the house and the garage combined. And I want to say it was between three and four thousand dollars between the bats and the foam insulation package. And um, you know, the way that I pitched this to my homeowners is we have to look at the big picture because the rule of thumb is with your heating and air, you get 600 square feet per ton with your your unit. And then when you size your unit with spray foam, you get as much as 900 to 1,000 square feet per ton. So you pay less in HVAC cost, which that translates 20 years down the road to less operating costs, and and you really have to look at it to say, hey, is this is this really gonna save me money? And the answer is always yes. And I try to present them the big picture uh option, but I think what made the decision for that last house that didn't go with spray foam was that they didn't plan on living there for very long. It was going to be a starter home, and as they expanded their family, you know, they were gonna move on and sell that home. But um everybody else, you know, that that approach seems to make sense to them. And, you know, um, but but three or four thousand dollars up front to save, what, quadruple that in a 20 or 30-year mortgage, I think is a no-brainer.

Why Installation Takes Longer Than Batts

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Yeah, and that in particular, that house was very square. It didn't have a lot of cathedral ceilings that would have required anywhere up to a couple thousand dollars worth of extra lumber and labor in order to fit in fiberglass in a cathedral or or something like that. And so that's where that's where we start catching up fast when they have to do a lot of extra things along with that 30% larger HVAC. They have to back a lot of walls that you're stopping at with fiberglass. They have to add lumber to make a 12.5 inch cavity to fit the right amount of fiberglass. They have to buy raised heel trusses once again to fit that bigger amount of fiberglass. And when you start adding those costs up, that three, four, five thousand dollars is kind of a joke, you know. And um, the the one, the first production, national production builder that went with foam, it took three years of meetings. And when we finally agreed that we were gonna kind of lock ourselves in a room until everybody understood the same things, there were three accountants in the corner with their heads down and their pencils going and their calculators going. And the head accountant suddenly said, Something's wrong. And that's when that's when Jay smiled. And he said, What would that be? He said, When we add everything up and subtract everything and do all that, we're gonna build that house for twelve hundred dollars less. And Jay says, now you're starting to understand. And they it is hard for a lot of builders and their accountants to see past the immediate, the immediate cost of the one item.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

I was looking up while you were chatting there. The ROI low end is uh uh seven years to pay back, but as early as three years to get your money back on that investment, and that's through energy savings, which can be 30 to 50 percent. That's absolutely amazing that more people don't use it. It might be just because they don't know that much about it, which is why we've got you on the show. Um Rich, my question now is I was thinking, okay, you're getting all the spray foam put in. I understand the bats, but you've got conduit, you might have wiring, you might have pipes going through these walls. Uh, does this expansion push them around or have any negative impact?

If Foam Is Better, Why Not Standard

SPEAKER_01 21:06

And that's one of the reasons I do prefer open cell over closed cell. Closed cell can't is very powerful, it can move things because those closed bubbles. I explained to people that you should think of it like that airbag they put under a tractor trailer that is flopped over on its side to stand it up. That's a big closed cell. And so the open cell that has the consistency of day old bread and is soft and moved around, moves around things very easily, causes a lot less problems and a lot less concern. Um, you can cut into it with a sharp pocket knife if you need to, and you know, there's quite often that somebody either put the wrong thing in place or forgot something. And I tell them look, cut a nice big square around it, stick your hands in and pull it, pull that big chunk out. Fix What you need to fix, butter this up with that canned foam we talked about earlier and squish it back in place and you're done. And so you know, they've done testing ad nauseum, they've done so many tests to prove that this stuff doesn't harm PVC, CPVC, all the different types of pipes and all the different types of wires. And I will say that Wake County has one thing that's really not in any of the literature, and that when there is spray foam, they lower the size of the bundle of wires that you can have closely strapped together. They drop it by about a third because uh the, you know, they did some of their own testing and they were unhappy with the interior temperature in the middle of those wires when with fiberglass you're allowed to have a bundle about three inches across, and they're much happier if that bundle is two inches across.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

When you go to the big box store, they have the regular foam in a can, and then they have the low expansion version of that for doors and windows. Is one of those closed cell and the other one open cell? Do you know that?

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Yeah, no, they are both they are both closed cell, but the you're talking about more or less great stuff or great stuff doors and windows, or DAP and DAP doors and windows. And the doors and windows expands only about a third of what the other can does. The reason the original can still exists is that you get three times more out of the same size can. And for using that highly, the the one that expands more for draft stopping for fire blocking around wires and pipes and all that, actually it's nice because it's gonna overexpand itself and make it even tighter. But when you are going around, especially windows, if you use something that expands that much, you're gonna suddenly find the next day the windows don't open so well.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Don't open. Yeah. And I think a lot of people have been down that road uh on accident.

HVAC Downsizing And Real ROI

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Yeah, and fortunately, if they make that accident, all you have to do is dig it back out. Your window frame will go back to shape and now put the right product in place.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Now I I've seen them get a little funky and they have the one that's supposed to deter any kind of insects. Do you know if do they put a chemical in there that uh bugs don't like?

SPEAKER_01 24:29

They might on those canned foams. Um, that one, that one's outside of my knowledge. On spray foam, yeah, they can't. Spray foam is super sensitive. And if you start putting things like insecticides in it, where you're supposed to get expansion of a hundred to one so that out of two 50-gallon drums, you get 19,000 board feet, you add almost any other chemical to it that doesn't belong there, and you're looking at 6,000 board feet. You're looking at losing two-thirds of your yield and raising the price of the phone by two-thirds.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Gotcha. I didn't mean to get on that, but it it crossed my mind. And when you mentioned that uh one expanded faster than the other, I thought maybe that was the case. But um, my next question, um, that this is an obvious question, but it also um I think for somebody who doesn't know a lot about spray foam and they're entertaining the thought of doing that when they have a new build or what have you, is what's the biggest reason spray foam outperforms just standard insulation? And I'm I'm guessing you're gonna get into convective and conductive heat transfer and and something like that, which we nerd out on all as much as we possibly can because that's a huge deal for your utilities and your air quality and the comfort of your home. And um, but but what's the biggest reason it outperforms everything?

Open Cell Around Wires And Pipes

SPEAKER_01 25:49

It addresses three all three types of heat. Conductive heat, convective heat, and radiant heat. If you've ever been up in somebody's room over garage and you're standing there talking and you lean against that sloped wall that that you know comes from the short wall up to the ceiling, in the middle of summer, that sucker's hot. And it's because, especially because the sun's radiant heat is pouring through it. Spray foam does an excellent job of really slowing down radiant heat, and at the same time, it slows down both conductive and convective. Convective is heat that moves around on air. And so probably the number one thing that changes the game is the air seal, the air barrier qualities. Um, when you spray even just three and a half inches of foam versus an R15 fiberglass bat, there's a 3,000 times difference in how much air can pass through it. And there's a American standards of testing and measure test, and I won't use start using all those numbers, but basically you have to suck the air out of a room until it would make your ears pop pretty good. And then they measure how much air gets in from the outside, and they measure it in liters of air per second per square meter of wall space. That number for fiberglass is between 20 and 30. That number for foam is 0.0080 liters per second per square meter, and so it's a crazy difference. And one of the things I like now with closed cell, that number is virtually zero, zero period. But with closed cell, because it does have that measurable air movement, that's why if water gets behind it, it'll dry through the foam. I'm very careful about where I put closed cell because if water gets behind it, it gets out by rotting its way out or rusting its way out. And that's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

Uh Rich, there's some more questions I have, but time isn't going to allow this, and I know Donnie will have more questions. Uh, is there a chance you can come back next week and we do a follow-up? Because I've got some questions about that a couple listeners have texted me. Is that cool? Absolutely. I'll be glad to talk more with you next time. Fantastic. I tell you what, everybody, we're gonna do a second show next week. We'll have Rich Brown, who again is with Prime Energy Group, talk about spray foam insulation because it's it's one of those things that you don't really think about until you realize the the cost benefit, the ROI. And there's some things we haven't even talked about on uh fire resistance or or sound, because that's a good positive thing to have with good insulation is reduction and outdoor sound and stuff that I'm sure you're gonna enlighten us with. So uh, Rich, I appreciate it. Let's do this again next week and we'll finish up the show on spray foam. You in too, Donnie? I'm in. Let's go. And uh thanks for tuning in to the Carolina Contractor Show. Thanks, everybody's