Open-cell foam insulation in Murrieta CA - a sealed attic with a plan for moisture

Most people who call me have an upstairs that's hot by afternoon, ducts running through the attic and a power bill that keeps climbing. The price moves with the size and pitch of your roof, how deep we spray, and whether the roof, the old insulation or an appliance has to be dealt with first. Those same things set the schedule, along with the time your family spends out of the house. Open-cell isn't always the answer, and sometimes closed-cell foam or plain air sealing fits better, so you get your own figure from the written estimate after I've been up in your attic.

Because open-cell foam can turn the attic into a sealed space, I look at the roof before I'll suggest it, starting with its age and any leaks or stains on the deck. A leak gets fixed and the damage repaired before any foam goes up, and if the roof is near the end of its life, replacing it first is worth weighing, even though that changes the budget and the order of work. Next I check every fuel-burning appliance up there, because one foam maker's guide says ordinary appliances that pull combustion air from the attic, like an older furnace or water heater, can't run safely once it's sealed and need sealed-combustion or power-vented units instead. The same guide calls for a safety check of those appliances before and after the work, so we settle with you who's doing it. Open-cell lets water vapor pass through, so it can't act as a vapor barrier, and we plan how moisture gets out of the sealed attic before we spray. Then our crew covers the house below, sprays the underside of the roof deck and the gable walls, and I check the eaves and corners as closely as the middle, since thin edges are where these jobs usually come up short.

Foam in the attic is often one piece of a bigger fix. If the house sits over a damp crawl space, a crawl space vapor barrier keeps ground moisture from working up into the floors, and it's worth looking at while we're planning how the whole house dries. Property managers call us about commercial insulation for offices and rental buildings, and we plan those the same way, roof and equipment first.

The city's Building and Safety Division handles plan review and inspections here, and its list for single-family alterations includes an insulation inspection after the framing and rough inspections. If your job needs a permit, we take care of the application and line up the inspections, and if it isn't clear whether it does, I check with the city before we start so you're not left guessing. The city also shares its fire hazard severity zone maps so owners can see where their address falls and the rules tied to it. If you're in one of those zones, a sealed attic has a real advantage, since unvented attics are considered significantly more fire safe in wildfire areas because ash and embers get into vented attics through the vents.

A lot of the attics we open here are in newer homes with tile roofs and the ducts and furnace sitting up in the heat, and we see the same setup on jobs in Temecula and Menifee. We're based in Murrieta and work across the cities around it, out to Lake Elsinore and Fallbrook and plenty of places in between.