Quonset spray foam insulation in High River is applied to the inside of a corrugated arch, which is the only assembly the shape takes because the curve has no flat plane and nothing rigid will follow it without leaving a void. On a yard in this district the arch is usually standing on the part of the ground nobody thought about.
An arch is only as good as what it is standing on
On a High River yard the bottom of the curve meets the ground along its whole length, which makes an arch unusually sensitive to what the ground does. Where one sits on flat or low ground in a district with this much runoff, the base of the sheet spends a large part of the year in contact with something wet, and that is where the corrosion is. Establishing what the ground does around the building is therefore not a preliminary, it is the assessment, and it decides whether the shell will take a layer at all.
Snow that slides off a curve and stays at the bottom
An arch sheds its snow rather than holding it, which sounds like an advantage and is not entirely one. What comes off the curve lands in a bank along both sides of the building and stays there, so the base of the sheet spends the winter packed against something that is wet whenever the temperature rises. In a district where the temperature rises often, that is a repeated wetting of exactly the line where these buildings corrode. Keeping that bank cleared, or grading so the melt runs away rather than sitting, does more for the life of an arch than anything sprayed inside it.
Cheap to put up and expensive to condition
It is worth understanding why these buildings hold what they hold. An arch is the cheapest large clear span anybody can erect, which is exactly why it went up, and it is among the dearest to condition, because the sprayed area follows the developed curve and comes to well beyond the floor area underneath it. That mismatch is the reason arches end up as unheated storage rather than as working buildings, and it is why the sensible scope on most of them is a smaller sealed area inside rather than the whole shell. Knowing the arithmetic in advance stops an owner being surprised by a number that looks high against the dimensions.
Deciding the arch alongside everything else on the yard
Bringing a rig onto a foothills yard is a fixed cost and the approach is not always available, so it is worth deciding what else on the property should be done while a crew is there. On most of these yards the arch is not the only candidate, and the answer to what to do about it frequently depends on what else is being treated at the same time. That conversation belongs at the quoting stage rather than after the arch has been priced on its own, because the arithmetic of a single visit covering two buildings is quite different from two visits covering one each.
Quonset Spray Foam Insulation High River: Common Questions
What causes rust at the bottom of a quonset? That is where these fail, and it is usually about what the ground does rather than the building's age.
Do we have to treat the whole arch? Frequently not. A smaller sealed area inside it is often the better answer.
Is it worth doing? Sometimes not. That gets said after the base has been looked at rather than before.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free High River quote. More on Quonset Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.