Sprayfoam Insulation

Fix Cold Floors, Inefficient Energy Use and Air Quality Issues

Air infiltration, in particular outside air infiltration, will negatively affect your crawlspace.   Many homeowners in the Chicagoland area spend many months a year with cold floors, high heating bills and even freezing pipes and freezing water lines.  Chicago area weather also brings hot and very humid summers, and again air from outside being vented into the crawlspace through those 8×16 air vents or just sneaking through the wood portion of the sill boxes, allow massive amounts of humidity and moisture into the air envelope of your crawlspace.  This humidity, combined with that coming from the ground and foundation leaks, will cause damage to floors, metal I-beams, wood floor joists and can even cause cupping hardwood floors on your first floor.  

Applied using top quality spray foam equipment and proportioners, Crawlspaces.com technicians can spray closed cell foam into the top perimeter of the foundation and over the wood sill plates, stopping outside air infiltration as well as insulating better than any other insulation.  This top area above the concrete foundation is called the “sill boxes”  This is the area of most crawl spaces that is above ground level, so it does experience the most extremes.  This is also where the builder of your home installed the 8×16 air vents that make little sense and a lot of potential damage.  These little windows can be blamed for huge energy losses in winter, and create condensation where warm moist crawl space air condenses on the nearby wood that can get moldy and even rot out.  When cold meets warm moist air, there will be problems.

The Crawlspaces.com team has resolved these problems by using closed cell sprayed foam insulation around the top perimeter, and also uses the sealing strength of this material as well.   Installing a sealed system as in crawl space encapsulation systems, being airtight is critical.  Using 4 inch crawl space tape is a very ineffective and temporary method to sealing slick, unlevel plastic sheets that are used by many of our competitors to seal off floors in crawl spaces.  This is especially true when attaching the liner to penetrations such as sewer pipes, water lines and center support column footings.  It is also obvious that connecting plastic sheet ground cover to the concrete foundation is nearly unattainable using mechanical pins or nails and a double sided tape.  However, closed cell spray foam is a permanent and perfect seal around these spots when applied correctly by experienced technicians.  In our best encapsulation system, the Nu-Crawl System, we also use closed cell foam insulation to seal the top of the Reflectix wall insulation / vapor barrier.  This is the only way we can achieve our promise of “a perfect seal with permanent results”.