Attic spray foam insulation in Acheson splits into two jobs that have almost nothing in common. One is the roof space over an office built into the front of a steel shop, which is the version we see most often on the industrial area west of Edmonton. The other is a genuine vented truss attic on an acreage house in the surrounding county. Both get called an attic. Only one of them is one.
The office roof space inside a shop
When an office is framed into the corner of an open industrial building, a flat ceiling usually goes in at eight or nine feet and the volume above it is left open to the shop. That space is not an attic. It is part of the shop, at shop temperature, with no vents to outdoors and no insulation on its outer boundary. So the office ceiling becomes the boundary between heated office and unheated shop, and in most buildings it is a suspended tile grid with nothing above it. Warm office air rises straight through the grid into the shop volume and is gone. Nobody notices, because there is no cold draught to feel; the office just never warms up and the furnace runs constantly.
A suspended ceiling is not an air barrier
This is the single most useful thing to understand about these buildings. A tile grid stops sight and some sound and almost no air. Light fittings sit in it, cable passes through it, the tiles lift at the edges, and the whole plane leaks continuously. The fix is to decide which surface is actually going to be the air barrier and build that one properly, usually the drywall or sheathed deck above the grid, with foam sealing it and the perimeter where it meets the exterior wall and the shop partition. That perimeter joint is where most of it goes.
The mezzanine makes it worse
Plenty of these offices have a second storey or a mezzanine, which puts an occupied floor directly under the shop roof deck with nothing between them but whatever the original builder chose. Up there the complaint is reversed: hot in summer under a steel roof in the sun, cold in winter under the same roof at minus thirty. Foam applied to the underside of the deck above that mezzanine handles both, because it is one assembly doing the work in both directions, and there is no cavity for air to circulate in behind it.
The real attic on an acreage house
On a country house the ordinary rules apply and the openings in the ceiling are the job, not the depth. Recessed lights, the bathroom fan housings, the plumbing stack, the top plates of interior walls, and the attic hatch, which is usually a sheet of board sitting in a frame with nothing on it and no gasket around it. On an exposed site the wind makes all of those worse than they would be in a sheltered subdivision, because it pressurises the house rather than letting air drift. Depth laid over an unsealed ceiling plane does very little; the air goes straight through it.
Why more depth is usually the wrong order
Insulation slows heat transfer. It does not stop air movement, and on a ceiling plane air movement is most of the loss. That is why an owner can pay for a deep blow-in, feel no difference and conclude the product failed. It did not fail; it was never the thing standing between the warm air and the outside. Sealing first, depth second, on either kind of attic in this area.
Who does the work
On attic spray foam insulation Acheson, the people who quote the work are the people who do it. We insulate it ourselves and we answer for the result.
Attic Spray Foam Insulation Acheson: Common Questions
Our office is inside a shop. Does it have an attic? Not really. The space above the office ceiling is usually open to the shop, so that ceiling is a boundary between two climates and needs to be treated as one.
We have a drop ceiling. Is that enough? No. A tile grid is not an air barrier. Warm air leaves through it continuously, which is why the office feels underheated with the furnace running.
The mezzanine is freezing in winter and roasting in summer. Why? Because it sits directly under a steel roof deck. Foam on the underside of that deck addresses both conditions with one assembly.
How much does attic spray foam insulation cost in Acheson? Attic work is priced per board foot for the sprayed portion, with any blown-in depth on top of that, so the figure follows area and target R-value. On an office-inside-a-shop the sealing items are small and separate, and they are usually where the money earns its keep.
How do I choose an attic spray foam contractor in Acheson? Ask which surface they intend to make the air barrier. If the answer is simply more insulation on top of what is there, they have not looked at the right plane.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Acheson quote. More on Attic Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.