Self storage spray foam insulation in Three Hills is mostly work on buildings that were not built as storage. In a town this size the storage offering is often an older building — a former shop, a implement dealership, a shed, a warehouse bay — that somebody divided into units, rather than a purpose-built row of identical lockers with its own insulated roof panel over each one.
Partitions that stop short of the roof deck
That is the defining feature and it changes everything about the envelope. The dividing walls in a converted building are usually framed up to a convenient height — eight or ten feet, or to the bottom of the trusses — and then stop. Above them the space is continuous from one end of the building to the other. From the tenant's side it looks like a sealed room with a door and a lock. In air terms it is one volume with some screens in it.
So there is no such thing as conditioning one unit. Whatever the air in that building does, it does to everybody's contents at once, and whatever forms on the roof deck is above all of them.
The deck is the condensing surface and it rains on everyone
Storage contents put moisture into the air. Boxes of paper and fabric, upholstered furniture, a camper that came in wet, bedding, tools with oil on them, a mattress — all of it exchanges water vapour with the air around it, and the building has no mechanical ventilation and nobody in it to notice. On a cold night the roof deck is the coldest surface in the building; the humid air reaches it and condenses; and when the sun comes up and the deck warms, the water drops. Operators get told about this months after it started, when a tenant opens a unit in spring and finds a water stain on a box that was never near a wall.
Which makes the deck the first and often the only surface worth doing
Spraying the underside of the roof deck does two things at once. It raises the temperature of the surface the moisture was condensing on, so it stops being the condensation point. And because closed-cell foam at roughly R-6 to R-7 per inch becomes a vapour barrier past about two inches, it stops interior air reaching the deck at all. On a converted building where the units are not separate air volumes anyway, treating the single shared surface above all of them is the move that matches the building.
Then the partitions, if heated units are going to be a product
If the operator intends to offer some units heated and leave the rest cold, the partitions have to become real walls — framed to the deck, sealed to it, and insulated as exterior walls, because that is what they are. That is a bigger piece of work than most operators expect and it is worth knowing before it is advertised. The alternative, and often the better business decision on a small site, is to seal the whole building and heat it modestly as one volume.
Doing it on an operating site
Units have tenants' property in them and tenants have keys. Realistically the work is done building by building, or bay by bay, with notice, and the deck can usually be reached over the top of the partitions without entering individual units at all — which on a converted building is a genuine advantage of its biggest flaw.
Self Storage Spray Foam Insulation Three Hills: Common Questions
Can we insulate just the heated units? Not if the partitions stop short of the roof deck, because then the units are not separate air spaces. Either the partitions get built to the deck or the building gets treated as one volume.
Where does the damage in a storage unit come from? Usually from condensation on the underside of the roof deck, forming overnight and dropping when the deck warms. The moisture comes from the stored contents themselves.
Which surface should we spend on first? The roof deck. It is the shared surface above every unit and the coldest one in the building.
How much does self storage spray foam insulation cost in Three Hills? Deck area and depth set the base. Working above occupied units and around partitions adds labour, and bringing partitions up to the deck is a separate job with its own number.
How do I choose a self storage spray foam contractor in Three Hills? Ask whether your partitions reach the roof deck, and what they would do if they do not. That one question separates somebody reading the building from somebody measuring it.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Three Hills quote. More on Self Storage Spray Foam Insulation Alberta province-wide.