Rim joist spray foam insulation in Stony Plain is the cheapest useful work on most houses here, and on the older half of the town there is more of it than a household expects, because each addition brought its own band with it.
One house with three bands in it
A house that started as a bungalow and acquired a back extension and an attached garage has the original band around the main foundation, a second one where the extension sits on its own foundation, and a third where the garage meets the house. Each was built by different people in a different decade to a different standard, and the junctions between them are the leakiest part of the whole building. A quote that prices only the band you can see from the bottom of the stairs has priced perhaps half the job.
The junction between old foundation and new is the worst of them
Where an addition's foundation meets the original one there is a vertical joint running from grade to the floor above, and it is almost never sealed. It was a construction joint between two pours made years apart, it has moved since, and on the inside it is usually hidden behind whatever the basement was finished with. That single joint frequently moves more air than the entire rest of the band, and finding it is the reason a proper look beats a quick quote on an older Stony Plain house.
What is actually in the bays, by era
On the oldest houses the answer is nothing, or a scrap of something pushed in during a renovation. On the seventies and eighties stock it is batt cut roughly and wedged, sometimes with the paper facing the wrong way. On the newest it is batt cut neatly and still doing nothing about air. All three leak, for slightly different reasons, and all three are corrected the same way, which is a sprayed layer that seals the joints rather than filling the space between them.
Reaching it while the basement is still open
On any house here where the basement is unfinished, the whole band is reachable in a day with no demolition. Once it is developed, reaching it means opening a finished room, and on the older stock that is likely to mean disturbing a finish somebody put in twenty years ago. It is worth doing before a basement development rather than after, and where a household is planning one it should be the first item on the list rather than an afterthought at the end of it.
Rim Joist Spray Foam Insulation Stony Plain: Common Questions
Is there really more than one? On any house with an addition, yes. Two or three is normal on the older stock here.
What if the bays already have insulation in them? Batt does nothing about air, and the band is a joint rather than a cavity. That is the point.
Can a finished basement still be insulated? Then it is behind the wall, and the honest advice is usually to wait until something opens it.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Stony Plain quote. More on Rim Joist Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.