(Full) Foam Insulation

[Chas]

Relax - this is just a quick story.

My building is 7200 square feet. One part of that is warehouse, and the rest is showroom and some upstairs offices.

It has been ice cold for the past few weeks - the heaters have been running all day but it never gets warm.

There are four large wind-driven turbines in the main showroom area, and they have metal dampers to shut them off as needed. But they seem to leak lots of air, and most likely a large amount of heat as well. It has been unusually cold and windy lately.

I sent my son up to the extension ladder yesterday to wire the stupid things tightly shut. Didn't help. Tried to put bags over them from the top, but they are big commercial units and we can't find bags that big.

I sent him back up the ladder today to cut, fit and install some foam blocks, cut from an old spa cover. The foam was about three inches thick, and we fit it as snugly as we could into the openings below the vents. Then we packed in some thin strips of foam to tightly seal any drafts and provide good insulation. He wanted to go up and inject some two-part foam from above, but I told him to wait and see how it went.

The building was warm and comfy within two hours of getting the last one 'fully foam insulated,' and I finally had to turn the thermostat down.

 8-)

[autoplay]

You could of DAITed it,and in turn,sold the power back to your utility company Aluminum foli is much cheaper that 1-2" closed cell foam/grin

[Chad]

My building is 7200 square feet. One part of that is warehouse, and the rest is showroom and some upstairs offices.

I couldn't even begin to imagine how expensive your utilities are in a building that size.

[Tman122]

Because of the rarity of cold weather in your area Chuck I would say the building practices are much different than they are here. Actualy it is amazing how in my part of the country you would never be able to get to those vents and there sole purpose would be to evacuate warm air leaked and created from the insulation below from the attic space. to keep it as cool as possible during the winter months. This allows the roof structure to remain below freezing so the snow  does NOT melt from the roof. In your case there must not be an attic space and those vents are for cooling the room. Now don't get me wrong we have commercial and industrial buildings without attic spaces but you would always force venting from the side, which is the same thing actualy, and the seal on this venting is very very important. How do they open and close and is there a gasketing system? Maybe the mechanism needs repair. Our company has 2 buildings one we lease and the other we own. The one we lease is 165,000 SF and has one main warehouse heating unit and several unit heaters at every overhead door. The office area is on a seperate rooftop unit, this building cost's us around 130,000 dollars a year to lease and this includes the heat. We are continualy remined by the lease managment company to turn down the heat, cept not this year because of mild temps.. My guess is it would be a grand a month during the cold snaps to heat. On the other hand the one we own is almost twice as big and no one evers complains about it's heat cost...Hmmmmmm

[drewstar]

You could of DAITed it,and in turn,sold the power back to your utility company Aluminum foli is much cheaper that 1-2" closed cell foam/grin

Funny thing is, that putz who pontificates out his lower backside orafice about being an expert in insualtion was jabbing away one time and mentioned his own work shop wasn't even isulated. Pics of him and his "shill" bundled up while in his barn  er..."shop" freezing their butts off.  A-Maz-Ing.

Kinda struck me funny.    

[Chas]

There wasn't even any insulation in the place when we moved in! It was a warehouse, and we converted it to Retail. The part that houses our warehouse still has no insulation.

I spent $2500 having the showroom insulated - I would have done it myself but we were busy doing a thousand other things at the same time and the pro who did it sent two guys who completed the task in a day and a half. They put in batts and then covered it over with that fire-retardant heavy paper stuff.

We didn't have any AC at the time, so we had them leave the vents alone -and we opened them in the warm weather. But it didn't work well enough, so I added AC this past spring. Now I think we'll just leave the vents closed for good - I may even go up and remove the turbines and put a metal cap over each one.

My electric bill is about $500 per month. September - Summer months can peak over $700.

[Brewman]

Don't you guys in So Cal have pretty high electric rates, to boot?
I've heard some nasty stories about that from some of the posters here.

[Chas]

Pics for story above. I know, it's rivetting stuff, isn't it?
Warehouse still has no insulation and lots of these 24" vents. Cold place to work on a cold day - not really too bad when it's hot out. Stays nice then.


Showroom has this plug in all of the four vents, plus a shiny new heating/AC system.


We made the plugs out of foam insulation boards from a Spa cover - not one from Roberts, in case you were wondering. This is non-tapered, 2# density stuff. What a mess it made.


 8-)