Cold storage spray foam insulation in Brooks is work on coolers, freezers and chilled rooms in a town where refrigeration is understood better than almost anywhere in Alberta. The rooms this page is about are the smaller ones, run by operators who do not have an in-house engineering department to lean on.
Ambient is what sizes the box, and here it runs high
A refrigerated room is not fighting the cold, it is fighting the difference between what is inside it and what is outside it. Around Brooks that difference is about as wide as it gets in this province: the outside air spends a good part of the summer in the thirties while the room is being held near freezing or below it. Every calculation that matters follows from that number, and a room specified against a milder ambient will run hard here and never quite settle.
Compressor runtime is the bill, and the envelope sets it
What an operator actually pays for is the hours the plant runs. Heat that gets through the walls has to be taken back out, and every kilowatt of it is bought twice, once on the way in and once on the way out. Sealing the room does not make the refrigeration more efficient, it gives it less to do, which is a better result and a cheaper one. It also shows up as shorter cycles rather than a machine that never stops, and a compressor that is not running flat out through August is a compressor with a longer life in front of it.
A small operator next to a very large one
There is a particular difficulty in this town, which is that everybody's mental benchmark for refrigeration is industrial. A small operator with one cooler will be quoted and advised as though they need what a large plant needs, and they usually do not. What a modest room actually needs is a continuous envelope, sealed junctions and a vapour control that does not have a break in it. That is achievable at a sensible scope, and the honest answer to a Brooks operator asking whether they need the full engineered treatment is frequently no.
The dry air outside and the wet air inside
In this climate the moisture is nearly all on the inside. Product respires, floors get washed down and doors bring in air that is dry rather than humid, so the drive runs outward through the walls and condenses somewhere in the middle of the assembly if there is anywhere for it to do so. A closed-cell assembly with no seam in the vapour control is what stops that, and where an existing room is being repaired the first question is where the previous vapour control was broken, because it will have been broken somewhere.
Cold Storage Spray Foam Insulation Brooks: Common Questions
Does the outside temperature really change the specification? Yes. The gap between inside and outside is the whole load, and here that gap is wide.
We are a small operation. Do we need what the big plants have? Usually not. A continuous, sealed envelope with unbroken vapour control is the substance of it.
Where do these rooms normally fail? At a junction, and almost always where the vapour control has a break in it.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Brooks quote. More on Cold Storage Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.