Wall spray foam insulation in Acheson means dealing with two unrelated wall types in the same building. The shop or warehouse portion has steel girts and a metal panel. The office portion is wood or steel stud with drywall. They are built by different trades, they fail in different ways, and a quote that treats them as one number has not looked at either properly.
The girt wall has no cavity worth the name
On the industrial side there is no stud bay. There are horizontal girts spanning between columns with a panel screwed to the outside, so the space is interrupted every few feet by a steel member running from inside to outside. Anything stuffed between the girts leaves the girts themselves cold, and anything laid across the girts gets crushed flat where the fasteners go through. Closed-cell foam sprayed against the inside face of the panel solves both, because it adheres to the panel and runs over the girt rather than stopping at it. In this climate the depth that matters most is the first two inches, because that is roughly where it becomes the vapour barrier and the cladding stops being a condensing surface.
The stud wall is a normal wall with one abnormal neighbour
The office walls are conventional framing and can be treated conventionally, except for the one that faces the shop. That wall has heated office on one side and an open industrial volume on the other, running twenty degrees colder for half the year, and it is nearly always built as an interior partition with nothing in it. It is an exterior wall in every way that matters. Sealing and insulating it does more for the office than anything done to the actual outside walls, and if welding or engine exhaust happens in the shop it is also the assembly keeping that out of the office air.
Concrete and block walls
A number of buildings here have a concrete or block wall at the base of the cladding, or a full masonry demising wall between bays. Those are solid, cold, and have no cavity at all, so insulation has to be added inboard. Closed-cell applied directly to the masonry adheres and keeps the dew point inside the foam rather than on the block face, which is the same reason it is the right product on a basement wall. Furring a stud wall out from block and filling it with batt reproduces the same mould assembly that fails in older basements, and for the same reason.
Flash and batt where it earns its place
Full-depth closed-cell is not always the proportionate answer. On a stud wall a flash coat of closed-cell against the sheathing, enough to air seal and control vapour, with a cheaper fibrous insulation filling the rest of the cavity, reaches the same target for less. It is a sensible route on the office side of an Acheson building where the cavity is a normal depth and the objective is comfort rather than condensation control on steel. On the girt wall it is less often appropriate, because there is no cavity to fill behind the flash coat.
Exposure changes the ranking
Buildings out here stand alone on open ground with their yards around them and nothing upwind. Wind pressurises the wall it hits and puts the opposite wall under suction, so air is driven through the building rather than drifting. The consequence is that panel laps, girt lines, door surrounds and the junction between wall and roof matter more than the stated R-value of the wall. On an exposed site, a well-sealed wall at a moderate depth outperforms a leaky wall at a generous one, every time.
One company, start to finish
For wall spray foam insulation Acheson, 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.
Wall Spray Foam Insulation Acheson: Common Questions
Can you insulate between the girts on a steel building? You can, but it leaves the girts themselves cold and they are the thermal bridges. Spraying over the girts against the back of the panel is the assembly that actually works.
Which wall should we do first in a shop with an office? Usually the wall between the two. It separates two very different temperatures and is normally built as if it separated nothing.
We have a block wall. What goes on it? Closed-cell applied directly to the masonry. A furred stud wall with batt against cold block reproduces the assembly that grows mould in old basements.
How much does wall spray foam insulation cost in Acheson? It is priced per board foot, so wall area times thickness drives it, and the choice between full-depth closed-cell and a flash coat with other insulation behind it is the main lever. Masking a working shop is the other real item.
How do I choose a wall spray foam contractor in Acheson? Ask them to price the girt wall and the stud wall separately. A single rate across both means somebody has not worked out which assembly they are looking at.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Acheson quote. More on Wall Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.