Ceiling spray foam insulation in St. Paul covers more than the flat ceiling under an attic. In a town where most of the housing predates 1991 and a lot of it has been extended, a single house commonly has three or four separate ceiling assemblies: the main attic ceiling, a ceiling over an enclosed porch, the underside of a floor above a breezeway or a carport, and a dropped ceiling in a basement or a back room hiding whatever the last renovation left behind. Each one has its own cold side and its own access problem.
The ceiling that is really a floor
Where a room sits over something unheated, the assembly is a ceiling from below and a floor from above, and it behaves like neither. An enclosed porch with a room over it, a bedroom projecting over a carport, a kitchen extension sitting on posts: in all of them the joists run between heated space and outdoor air, and the usual treatment is batt pushed up into the bays and a soffit material tacked on underneath. Cold air gets into those bays from the perimeter and moves the length of them, so the batt is working against moving air and losing. Foam adhered to the underside of the subfloor stops the movement first, which is why the room above goes from unusable to normal.
Low ceilings and sloped ceilings with no depth
Older houses here carry rooms with limited headroom and ceilings that follow the roof. Both rule out thick insulation. Closed-cell foam at roughly R-6 to R-7 per inch is what gets a worthwhile number into a shallow cavity. Open-cell, at roughly R-3.5 to R-3.8 per inch, is the better choice where the point is sound between two heated rooms rather than heat loss to outside, and it should not be used where the far side is cold without a vapour strategy worked out.
Every ceiling has holes in it, and in winter they stay open
A ceiling plane is perforated by light fixtures, fan housings, the plumbing stack, the top plates of the walls that meet it, and in this stock the chases left behind by removed chimneys. Each one is small. Together, they are a continuous opening between a warm room and a cold space. Northeastern Alberta does not get the periodic winter thaws that let an assembly dry out midway through the season, so moisture carried up through those openings arrives at a cold surface, freezes, and stays frozen until spring. The release looks like a leak, arrives in April, and sends people onto the roof.
The dropped ceiling question
Dropped and furred ceilings turn up constantly in houses of this age, and the honest answer is that we need to know what is above one before pricing anything under it. Sometimes it is simply a lower finish on a sound insulated assembly. Sometimes it conceals an old ceiling with no insulation over a room that used to be outside. Opening a small access and looking costs almost nothing and changes the quote substantially, and we would rather do that than guess high.
How the work is ordered
Seal the ceiling plane: fixtures, fan housings, stack, chases, top plates, and any junction where two eras of framing meet. Spray the assemblies that have a cold side and no realistic cavity, which on most of these houses means the areas over porches, breezeways and additions. Add bulk depth over the open attic flats with blown-in material, because that is the cheaper way to buy depth and there is no reason to buy it as foam.
Who quotes it and who sprays it
We take care of ceiling spray foam insulation St. Paul end to end -- the assessment, the quote, the scheduling and the spraying. Our crews do the work.
Ceiling Spray Foam Insulation St. Paul: Common Questions
Which ceilings actually need foam? The ones with outdoor air on the other side and not enough depth to work with. Over an attic with plenty of room, sealing plus blown-in depth is the sensible combination.
The room over our porch is always cold. That floor is an exterior assembly and its joist bays are usually open at the perimeter. Stopping the air movement in the bays is what changes it.
Can you spray over an existing finished ceiling? Not usefully. We either work from above where there is attic access, or we open the assembly. Which one applies is the first thing we establish on site.
How much does ceiling spray foam insulation cost in St. Paul? It is priced per board foot of foam at the required thickness, so the driver is how much area has a cold side and how it is reached. Access and any drywall removal belong in the quote as their own items.
How do I choose a ceiling spray foam contractor in St. Paul? Ask them to name each ceiling assembly in the house separately. If the quote has one ceiling line on a house with an addition and a porch, it has not been measured.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free St. Paul quote. More on Ceiling Spray Foam Insulation Alberta province-wide.