With people ever more conscious of reducing natural resources and energy prices soaring now might seem like the ideal time to consider improving your insulation around your home.
Action groups like insulate Britain have gone to extraordinary lengths to raise awareness in the UK to encourage people to insulate their homes more effectively.
Its only common sense that you would want to eek out every penny of your energy spends to ensure that the heat you pay for stays in your home ,heating you for as long as possible and not simply escaping out of your house.
Indeed, the government is actively encouraging this with insulation grants and hordes of companies are seizing on the opportunity to leaflet drop areas with the promise of free roof insulation.
Spray foam seems like a great idea – especially if it’s paid for by someone else- so what’s the catch?
There are two types of spray foam – open cell and closed cell – Open cell has bigger air pockets and is considered easier to remove than closed cell . There are 2 types of open cell commonly used in the UK Icynene & Lapolla
All are sprayed directly onto the underside of the rafters and expands likes builders’ foam to fill all the gaps and make a virtually airtight area to keep all your precious hard-earned heat in – great right?
…..errr perhaps not, roofs need to ‘breathe’ – ask any builder or roofer and they will tell you the one thing that will cause a roof to fail prematurely is moisture build up due to lack of air movement. The moisture gets trapped, can’t escape and causes the wooden elements of the roof to decay. With no air to take the moisture away the batons and rafters simply can’t cope and will over time rot away, resulting in a very expensive repair down the line.
Can it be removed? Open cell is easier to remove using dissolving agents but closed cell far harder and in a lot of cases involves a roof off approach to take it out
The Lifetime Mortgage Equity release sector has over 750 products available* with over a dozen lenders and yet at the time of writing only 1 lender on one product will consider 1 type of retrospectively applied Open cell spray foam (Icynene)– why?.
So, referring back to my original question – what’s the catch? … well you’re asking a lender to lend for a potential ‘lifetime’ and after you’ve sprayed the foam on it the roof you have possibly just set a ticking timebomb in motion that could undermine their return and just get worse as the years roll on. No wonder they don’t want to lend on properties that have it.
Worryingly the spray foam industry doesn’t like to publicise this, even more worryingly the UK government seems oblivious whilst helping finance this issue. We would like to call for a statutory warning notice advising people of the downsides of installing spray foam as well as the upsides
https://www.homelogic.co.uk/solved-spray-foam-roof-insulation-problems-and-pitfalls
https://www.1stassociated.co.uk/articles/spray-foam-insulation.asp
https://sdlsurveying.co.uk/news/surveyors-blog-valuation-considerations-of-spray-foam-in-roofspaces/
