Learn Insulation In an Hour: Part 2

Spray foam insulation sounds straightforward until you hear the questions homeowners and inspectors actually ask: Can it trap moisture and hide rot? Why did some historic buildings overseas push back on it? Is open cell spray foam safer for older structures than closed cell? We get into the details with Rich Brown of Prime Energy Group and focus on what matters in the field, not just on paper: drying potential, leak detection, and how your insulation choice can protect or punish the materials inside your walls and roof. 

We also talk about the everyday homeowner side of the job, including how to prep an attic so installers can properly cover the roof deck, why spray angle and access matter, and what changes when you turn a vented attic into a sealed attic. That leads into the questions around fire ratings and why “no storage” rules often come down to how an attic could be used, not whether foam is automatically dangerous. Rich shares how open cell foam behaves under direct flame, how tested attic configurations manage pressure, and a striking real-world story where foam helped prevent a lightning-related fire from turning catastrophic. 

Then we zoom out to comfort and livability: why spraying the roofline can keep HVAC equipment out of 140-degree attic heat, how pull-down stairs can become a major air leakage weak point, and what spray foam can and cannot do for sound control. From homes under flight paths to busy roads and shared interior walls, we cover strategies that produce quieter results in the real world. If you found value here, subscribe, share this with a homeowner or builder, and leave a review with your biggest insulation or comfort question for a future show.

Transcript

Welcome And Where To Listen

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Carolina Contractor Show with your host, General Contractor Donnie Blanchard. Oh, it's good to be back on the Carolina Contractor Show across from me, Donnie Blanchard. And man, we had a great interview last week with uh Rich Brown. He's with um Prime Energy Group. Yep. And uh by the way, if you're really cool with Rich, you can call him Ron. So if I refer to him as Ron, it's because the cool relationship we have. Donnie, maybe someday you'll get up to that level with you call him Rich, but I might call him Ron. Actually, his name is Rich, and we're gonna talk to him just a sec. But uh I do want to mention to check out our website, the Carolinacontractor.com. We've got links to past shows, including the one we did last week with Rich. And we've also got YouTube links, social media links. Again, thank you for the responses on the videos we've started putting up. We never plan to break hundreds of thousands of views, but that's what's happening. And so thank you very much. Uh, you got a question for us, you can submit a question through the website. Uh, give us a topic idea. Spray foam, that was a topic idea. Now we got a pro on, and we had them on last week. And Donnie, uh I'm not gonna reintroduce what we did last week on the show, but I will let you start this one and ask uh Ron a question that we talked about off-air that I thought was fascinating, which is why we're doing a second episode with with uh good old Rich.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

He let he let you call him Ron a couple of times and you just ran with it. That's funny we're tight. We're tight. We're tight like that. Um yeah, last week's show was a big hit. Uh I got a lot of calls uh after after the show aired, and spray foam is one of those things where it's not brand new, but it surely caught fire more in the last decade than than it has, you know, the decades prior. And and the product has just advanced so much, and sort of like big screen TVs, the price has gone down exponentially when you think about it, what it used to be 10 years ago. And uh Rich it Rich and his company are just super, and they you know not only do they have a great product, but they have great pricing. And uh in our last week's show, he explained how they are able to save money and how they're how the the open sale spray foam is quite a bit of savings versus the closed sale. And I think the difference between your company and others is you pass that discount on to the contractors and the homeowners. So um I wanted to open up because uh one of the questions I got this week was from an inspector. So when when he talks, he's one of the the big guys around my town and um you know just a really smart dude. And he says, Well, I said I told him we were gonna have you back on for a second show, and he says, Well, ask him this. What does he know about spray foam being outlawed in, I guess it was Scotland or or somewhere over there, and that they absolutely did not allow spray foam anywhere anymore.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Absolutely, and thanks again for having me back. The issue there is partly an issue of preference on product. You're looking in some cases at 600-year-old or 1600-year-old castles in Scotland and Ireland with lumber that's been there for centuries. And it's always been exposed to the air, and it's always been allowed, if it gets wet, it's been allowed to dry. And it's embedded in masonry a lot of the time. And so that masonry, that masonry tends to condense water. And along comes a spray foam, well, along comes a general contractor that sees a lot of problems. He sees potentially crumbling masonry walls, he sees things that are things that are flexing that shouldn't flex. Sometimes he sees subcode wiring and plumbing, and he hides them all between behind hard closed cell foam that you can't get you can't get behind it without doing something pretty destructive. And so, you know, the thing about closed cell foam is it doesn't let water out. As a matter of fact, if you take a two inch by one foot by one foot piece of it, you now have a Coast Guard-approved flotation device. And so what I always what you keep hearing me say, if water gets behind it, you've got a problem. So you take centuries-old lumber and suddenly stick it behind water and air impermeable plastic, and it be really begins crumbling quickly. And so the the structural wood crumbles, but it's hidden behind plastic that is not structural. And so this castle changes hands. The inspectors, the home inspectors, or even code inspectors come and there's a smooth wall. That's all they can see is a smooth wall of insulation, and they pass it. And eventually you get catastrophic failure. And so it's my opinion that they would have solved a lot of those problems by going with open cell to the extent that when a home, a home inspector or code inspector calls me and says, Hey, how do I know what's behind this? I recommend that they go ahead and take out their pocket knife and cut a nice square out of there and dig down to the what's behind it to satisfy themselves because it's easily repairable.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

I just about jumped in there and asked you if open cell would have solved that problem. And you you answered it right before I jumped in there. But yeah, um, for everybody who uh it's common knowledge with us, but for folks who don't know a lot about spray foam, one of the ways you flip me to open cell versus closed cell is is when you insulate an attic uh as opposed to traditional insulation, which would go above the drywall and the ceiling, so it goes between those ceiling joists, uh Rich's product, the open cell insulation goes between the rafter cavities. So it's uh it's actually at the point where the heat transfer would happen the most between the roof and the attic area. And uh with that open cell, it allows moisture transfer where open cell wouldn't. And so if you ever have a roof leak, heaven forbid, uh, and if you do, I probably didn't do the roof. But if you did, if you did, it'll allow that water to come through and it'll usually tell you the source of the leak a lot faster than the alternative.

Roof Leaks And Finding The Source

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Yeah, because with the foam is adhered to the roof deck, and so a typical roof leak on a new house, let's say, the general contractor sends that roofer over there, and they send three guys who wander around aimlessly and can't find the source of the leak. And one of the reasons they can't find the source of the leak, they've got a they over here they've got a puddle, but the actual leak is 25 feet up the roof deck and it ran down the wood until it happened to hit a nail and and dripped in that random spot. But when you've got foam adhered to the roof deck, it can't run anywhere. So it goes straight down with gravity and right there where the drip is, is right there where your leak is.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

All right, Rich. The question I got was not much about houses, but is spray foam what's in the the Yeti coolers?

SPEAKER_02 7:21

It is. Now, see, there's there's a closed cell foam. There's a great use for closed cell foam because it has not only those closed bubbles that don't let any air, almost any air or any water by. It also contains refrigerant gas, most notably R134A, the coolant that's in your car air conditioner or used to be before they got real stingy about things. Um now, it's great for a cooler. I'm not wild about eventually it finding its way into your house. Um, if you know, we put a lot of closed cell in crawl spaces, uh, you know, you're not standing next to it, breathing it all day. And those crawl spaces typically have their own source of HVAC ventilation or dehumidification that will eventually process that chemical out of there, anyways.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

So what you're saying is a DIY Yeti isn't too hard to accomplish. I mean, you could you could make a Yeti at home pretty pretty darn easy.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

Yeah, people actually people have made very comical ones purposely making them silly. And as a matter of fact, one of the one of the great uses of closed cell foam is when they needed to make emergency housing for soldiers, for whoever, in the desert. They built big fiberglass molds like you'd see for concrete. They sprayed them with a release agent, they sprayed them with foam, turned them over, banged on them, and lifted them, instant igloo.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Incredible. That's ingenious. Um, last week, Rich, we talked about the process of when it's being put in. Uh, you have to be out of the house, and then you stay out of the house when the job is finished for about 24 hours. Correct. Let's move before that. I have you coming over to do my attic. What do I, as a homeowner, need to do before you get ready, before your boys pull into the driveway? Anything specific I need to do?

Yeti Coolers And Closed Cell

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Move your 5,000 boxes of decorations and books and your college clothing that doesn't fit you out of your attic. Because we're going to have to get to every square foot of the roof deck and the walls. And so there cannot be much in the way for them to do that well because you spray, you spray at 1300 pounds of pressure. And if you start spraying at a pretty good angle, a lot of it's going to just bounce off. So you got to spray pretty perpendicular, which doesn't leave you a lot of room for maneuvering around possessions.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Um, this is this is the burning question, no pun intended. But I get this from a lot of folks because they've heard it from somebody, and maybe it was an old timer, and and all they heard about spray foam was what the information that was available uh 10 years ago. But why is it that you have to prove in so many situations that uh spray foam is has um is more fire retardant than just regular fiberglass? I mean, I'm sure you get that question a lot.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Yes. And and when I first started asking that question of inspectors, I got some crazy answers. But fortunately, one of the people who was on that committee is also a Wake County inspector and now the inspection supervisor. And he said, Look, the whole thing about it, you know, we say no storage allowed, but he says, what their issue really is, is if there's enough flooring up there to have storage, there's enough flooring for a kid to bring his sleeping bag and his pillow and live in that attic. And it makes that attic living space. And you have to, because of that, because we're spraying the roof and making it the same temperature as a house, we're forced to prove that it's just as fire resistant as the living space in the house. So it's a it's a function of use, not of the product itself.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Didn't you tell me a while back that you you've done a couple of experiments and you've um you mentioned that people purposely try to light this stuff on fire and it it just doesn't give way. And I know that the when we talked about convective heat transfer, which is basically like air pressure you know moving through uh vulnerable points in the house, and of course, you know, no secret that the the wind picking up is going to make the fire uh blaze up there. But um uh didn't can you recap a couple of those scenarios?

Prepping Your Attic For Install

SPEAKER_02 11:55

Because of the number of very tiny bubbles in, for instance, open cell phone, it has an oxygen index, two points too low to burn on its own. If you put a blowtorch on it, it'll be consumed by those flames. And as soon as you pull the blowtorch away, no fire. If you start the wood that it's attached to on fire, that wood fire will consume the foam, but on its on its own, it won't burn. And because of that, when the fiberglass industry threw some, let's say, questionable fire tests at us to try to force more expensive chemicals to be used, Icinine did their homework and did their testing and came up with the fire-resistant attic configuration. And we spray the attic like we always did with no vents, and you have to have a pull-down or an outward opening hatch that can be pushed open by pressure. And so, under full-on fire conditions, the expansion, the wood's burning, the expansion gases begin growing, they pressurize the attic and they push open that pull-down ladder, and the oxygen, which is being pushed downward, drains out like you pulled the plug on a bathtub. And in 13 tests they did for different agencies, the average time to put the fire out was 47 crazy. Wow. I'm a believer.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Okay, Rich, this is a question I got, and uh maybe I'm being too simple. Donnie probably could even answer this one, but I'm gonna sound like a cheap person. Why not just spray the attic floor and maybe even afterwards put uh OSB on it, you know, so it's walkable, but why not just spray that versus spraying um up to the roof and and the rafters? Because I would think it would be a lot less material you would have to use.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Absolutely. And it's it's a great question. And the thing about it is that's where fiberglass goes, is down on that second floor ceiling or attic floor, however you want to look at it. Um and we've done that, and it's not a terrible solution, but it doesn't give you all the advantages that you can get. If you've got a heating and cooling system up there, instead of letting it get up to 140 degrees in the summer and down to you know 35 or 40 degrees in the winter, you can put it inside that heated and cooled envelope and keep it at room temperature all year. And among other things, that system will last far longer. Um, when you try to spray down against the floor, of course, you still have to have access to that attic. So you've got some sort of a pull down, and that becomes a very weak spot because it's almost impossible to perfectly insulate that item. And so an awful lot of air moves past it, and now you've got back the stack effect that you were trying to defeat. You've got air moving from indoors to outdoors. Um, and so there's those couple of reasons. And yeah, spraying the roof anywhere from an extra 10% of material to an extra 50% of material. Um, but it's generally worth that cost. And on top of that, in house in a stick-built house that has a third-floor attic that someday could become the teenager's room when that, you know, especially during COVID, there were an awful lot of unexpected babies that showed up in families with teenagers. They moved the teenagers to the third floor attic without having to buy a new house. And because it was already sprayed with foam, boom, all they had to do was sheetrocket.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Now that makes perfect sense. I pitch it to my homeowners to the tune of uh of a free and clear ceiling space. So if you ever want to add a recess can, you ever want to add some kind of pendant lighting, you can have full full exposure to the back side of that ceiling. And um, it's just so nice to be able to have a uh open range of of an attic that you don't have to crawl over insulation. You don't wonder what's under there, and it just it's a it's a clean look when you get in the attic. And uh, like I mentioned earlier in the show, just the being the barrier between the heat transfer between the attic and the uh the roofing material in the summertime is a game changer. It's usually, I don't know, and no no warmer than 80 degrees on a 90-plus degree day in in that attic. And so if you got to do something up there, even if you're just putting things up there to store, it's a much more comfortable environment.

Fire Ratings And Attic Storage Rules

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Exactly. And uh, and again, if you spray down onto the ceiling, what you miss out on is that fire-resistant attic configuration that can make all the difference in the world. And I've gotten very an awful lot of calls from people that that said, hey, the fire marshal told me this foam saved my house. Um, in particular, uh an almost 200-year-old farmhouse in Apex that was hit by lightning, and they had all cast iron drain and um down, you know, downpipes. They had metal roofing. And when it got hit by lightning, the fire marshal was freaked out. He actually his exact words were tinderbox, move your butts. And he was, you know, he had to do some things. He got there about a half an hour later, and what he expected to see was a fully involved house that that had been lit up by lightning. Instead, what he found was his guys milling around and one of his guys saying, Come see this. And there was about a three-foot by three-foot area where the foam had been turned from eight and a half inches of good spray foam to about three inches of fluffy, feathery stuff because it had been heated. The best estimate is it had been heated to about 2,800 degrees in a second, but that second was long enough for it to prevent the wood under it from combusting because it couldn't get oxygen.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Very cool. A uh typical everyday question I get in my world is we want to soundproof our wall to our master bedroom, or people want to soundproof the laundry room because they don't want to hear the washing machine banging around. Um, that's there's no exact science, and and we've tried to tackle that in so many different ways. And um, you know, we've found some success around bathrooms where we may stagger studs and things like that, where we we eliminate the vibration component from that. But I don't think I've ever talked to you about this, and I should have before now, but what what are the uh what are the soundproofing properties of spray foam and does it really help? It does.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

And the thing about the funny thing about it is in the laboratory, the open cell foam and the fiberglass have the same ratings. But in that laboratory, they're setting the width of the studs with a micrometer, and they're spending on a 10 by 10 test wall, they're spending five or six hours installing that fiberglass perfectly to get their sound transmission rating and their noise reduction coefficient. And the thing is, spray foam, there's no difference. We again, my guys just hold down the trigger and put the liquid in there and let it expand, and you get laboratory results in the everyday world. And so when you have, let's say, a master suite that lines up with the multi-use room that has a big screen TV and a huge speaker stereo and stuff, and I've seen it lots of times, and people don't think about it until it's too late to really make a big change. And like you said, that staggered stud wall, use a uh two by eight bottom plate and then put your put your studs forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, um, we'll stretch a fabric through the middle of that and spray it from both sides and leave an inch of dead space on this side of the wall and that side of the wall. That's cool. With five inches of foam in between. And the combination of those things does an excellent job. And soundproofing is a word that I shy away from because there really is no such thing. And the closest thing to a soundproofing material is something called acoustic block that goes for about six dollars a square foot. And when it first came out, it was two thin rubber sheets with a very thin lead sheet between them. So the rubber absorbed, the lead, I mean, the rubber bounced back, the lead absorbed, and it did a great job. In the meantime, they developed a polymer that actually turns sound into minute amounts of heat. So it's active sound canceling for six bucks a square foot. So you really got to want it. Yeah, exactly. Now, on the outside of the house is the most notable area where that sound change happens. Um, we've had a lot of houses that we've sprayed that are in the glide path under RDU, under PTI. And when those planes come overhead, that screaming noise comes right in through your soffit vents and your gable vents and bounces around in your attic and gets down into your house. So the first thing when we create that sealed attic. is we're stopping direct transmission of sound and it has to come through our foam and it has to come through wood. So that drops it so dramatically to start with. I just did a I just did a metal building that a family is using as their schoolhouse for their children for the homeschooling. And it only sat about 30 feet away from the road. And over the time they've owned that house that road has gotten much busier and there's more truck traffic than there used to be and especially diesel trucks. And it's pretty hard to conduct school with that roaring and rumbling and all those noises. And so we sprayed we actually you know he put studs up we sprayed five and a half inches in the walls and six and a half inches in a roof deck. And other than the big 20 wheel stone trucks they're largely not hearing anything they're they hear uh they hear a hum not a huge rumble.

Why Spray The Roof Deck

SPEAKER_01 23:06

That's an that's fantastic. Uh this is the Carolina contractor show we're talking with Rich Brown Prime Energy Group. We're talking about spray foam insulation and my question I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to ask this as clear as I can so bear with me but if you're over to insulate my attic at my house but it's the attic is connected to another attic over the unheated garage you with me?

SPEAKER_02 23:33

Yep how do you separate the two types of attics from each other during the process yeah and now in a new house they most often frame that and put up sheathing and we just spray that wall. But especially in an existing house I don't I don't want my customer to have to spend several thousand dollars to get to bring in a builder to do something like that. And so we put up a fiberglass reinforced fabric and then spray it with foam and make a foam wall to separate those two things. And the the fiberglass reinforced fabric is very tough you better have a really sharp razor knife when you're cutting it or you're not going to get very far. And so you know we we attach it to the framing spray it and when we spray it because it's it's almost like you took one of your fiberglass HVAC filters and wove it into a cloth. And so when we spray at 1300 psi the side we didn't spray gets about an eighth of an inch layer of foam on it because it infiltrates right through and because it's doing that whenever you've seen something stuck in fabric if you you know somebody somebody spilled some spilled some paint even and you mopped it up with a towel and threw the towel aside when you pick the towel up the combined dried paint and towel is actually a pretty darn tough surface and that's that works out quite well separating those areas and sometimes we're separating the attic from over the porch we're separating you know there's there's quite a quite a few circumstances that that comes in very handy. And one of the local inspectors questioned the practice and we actually had a an engineer from Icinine evaluate the practice and wrote a great letter really sticking it to the inspector saying that we thank our lucky stars for contractors like Prime Energy that come up with these great ideas. And the inspector's like oh man they laid it on thick.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Hey the truth is the truth it doesn't matter what anybody thinks right if it hurts an inspector's feelings it is what it is. Get up to date pal. Before we wrap up the show you and I talk about these really interesting crazy projects that you do and um can you just give us a quick rundown on some of the bigger projects that I mean not that you need any credibility after people hear you explain this stuff but man you know give up give us a couple of good ones Rich.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Yeah we've we we've sprayed a couple of downtown Raleigh nightclubs they're they're and you're you're talking thousands of dollars every month that they're saving particularly in air conditioning um if you've ever if you've ever either seen the logo or been to High Point University we sprayed that big dome that's on all the pictures you see of that of that university. We sprayed Liberty Hall a 200 plus year old historic house and museum in Keenansville North Carolina that was part of the Underground Railroad um and and again now we're talking centuries old lumber that you have to be very careful not to not to suddenly cause it to start rotting um we've done innumerable state employees credit unions one of my favorites was the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill um and we're recently got involved in helping to design 100 low-income duplex units utilizing the largest size ocean going containers um that are going to be put on a kind of five corners street where all the bus routes come through so that every aspect has already been thought of to make this a sustainable way to help these people get out of the situation they're in. And I believe the biggest project we've done is a 2000 square foot Amazon fulfillment center.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

Wow and I I really like the container idea because not only is it good quick housing but then you're making it very livable and energy usage wise very economical for people who aren't necessarily in position to afford a high bill.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

And extremely durable yeah and that is you know when I was a kid when they built that kind of housing it was 100% brick and it was that way for a reason because it's highly durable and so that's another aspect of these and they're putting all of the all of the glass in the doors and windows is like 160 mile an hour rated glass so it really takes it really takes a purposeful a purposeful blow to break one of those one of those windows. And Rich, before we wrap up if someone's interested in their house or business what's the first step they need to do to contact you um look us up look up Prime Energy Group on the web um call me personally I'm actually the main person in my company that goes to people's existing homes and measures their home and sits down at their kitchen table and answers their question and gives them a price on the spot.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

I tell you what you wouldn't have to explain much to me I'd just say go upstairs look in my attic and then you come down and say hey here's the deal and I'd be that yeah you don't have to explain anything here here go do it.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

You'll get your own personalized 30 minute version of uh the radio show for your own house like easy give you 30 minutes and you won't even know what happened.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

There's a reason I don't wear a watch because I will sit there and answer every question they have and 97 year old lady Mrs. Olzuki grilled me for an hour and a half and and had excellent questions had better better questions than you guys in some cases.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Hey we want to say Rich thanks for being on the last episode you'll ever be on this show thanks for saying that Rich Brown with Prime Energy Group talked about spray foam insulation thanks for coming on because it is a compliment we don't do many uh double shows but the second time in a row uh we had to do a double show with you because the information's great and for people interested again just search up Prime Energy Group. Fascinating information great we love energy saving tips and and the spray foam is uh what a a great subject to talk about on the Carolina Contractor absolutely you demand Rich thank you again absolutely glad to be here thank you and we want to thank everybody who uh tuned in to watch us on the YouTube feed or you're listening on the radio station or in a podcast again you can just visit the website for more information the Carolinacontractor.com and we hope to see and hear from you again next week. Take care everybody