Pole barn spray foam insulation in Bonnyville is retrofit work on post-frame buildings, which is what most of the newer farm and acreage structures around the Municipal District are. Post-frame goes up economically on rural ground and spans well, and it is a reasonable way to build. It is also a structure that was never designed with an insulated envelope in mind, and that creates a set of problems unique to it.
There is no sheathing to work with
A stick-framed wall has a continuous sheet of sheathing behind the siding. A post-frame wall does not. It has posts at wide spacing, horizontal girts spanning between them, and metal cladding screwed directly to the girts. So there is no solid plane to insulate against and no cavity in the ordinary sense, just the bays between girts with steel on the outside of them. Anything hung in those bays is hanging in front of the cladding with air behind it, which in this climate is the arrangement that produces condensation on the steel.
Sprayed to the cladding, over the girts
The method that works is closed-cell foam applied directly to the inside face of the metal, continuing over the girts rather than stopping at each one. That achieves two things at once. It eliminates the air space, so interior air never contacts cold steel. And it covers the girts themselves, which are a thermal bridge of their own and in a long uninterrupted cold season will otherwise show as cold bands across the wall. The foam also stiffens the panel against the flexing and oil-canning that loose cladding does in wind.
The posts are the detail that gets missed
In a post-frame building the posts are typically set in the ground and run from below grade to the roof in one piece. That means a solid timber member passing straight through the thermal boundary, with frozen soil at one end and heated interior at the other, for five months at a stretch. Foam can be carried around the inside face of each post, and getting into the corners at the post faces properly is part of doing the job rather than an extra. Where the post meets the ground and the splash plank, sealing matters for rodents as much as for heat.
Open eaves, and what happens when you close them
Many post-frame buildings here were built with open eaves, so the space above the ceiling line is continuous with outdoors. If the building is going to be insulated and heated, that path has to be addressed deliberately: either sealed and the roof plane insulated, or left open and the ceiling plane treated as the boundary. Doing half of each is what produces frost in the trusses. Which route to take depends on whether the ceiling is ever going to be finished and whether anything is stored above it.
A heated bay inside an unheated building
The most common sensible scope on a Bonnyville pole barn is not the whole structure. It is a partitioned bay at one end, insulated and heated, with the rest left as a tight but unheated shell. That keeps the heating load proportionate to how much of the building actually gets used in winter, and it lets the shell do the one job it needs to do all season, which is stay dry. Say when you call whether you intend to heat the whole building or part of it, because the two scopes barely resemble each other.
The crew on your job
For pole barn spray foam insulation Bonnyville, we quote and manage the whole job and our own installers do the work. The free quote comes from the people who will be on site.
Pole Barn Spray Foam Insulation Bonnyville: Common Questions
There is no sheathing. What does the foam go on? The inside face of the metal cladding, carried over the girts. That removes the air space that would otherwise let interior air reach cold steel.
What about the posts? They run from below grade to the roof as one member, so they bridge the whole boundary. The inside faces get covered as part of the job.
Our eaves are open. Does that matter? It decides where the boundary is. Either close them and insulate the roof plane, or leave them and treat the ceiling as the boundary, but not a mixture.
How much does pole barn spray foam insulation cost in Bonnyville? It follows sprayed area and thickness, so the biggest single factor is whether you are doing the whole building or a partitioned heated bay. On most farm buildings around here the partitioned bay is the proportionate answer.
How do I choose a pole barn spray foam contractor in Bonnyville? Ask how they handle the girts and the posts. A quote that treats a post-frame wall as if it had stud cavities has not understood the structure.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Bonnyville quote. More on Pole Barn Spray Foam Insulation Alberta province-wide.