This Old Soy House

Several people have contacted us inquiring about the article from the July/August issue of This Old House with our story on soy foam insulation.

Well, the good folks from TOH have now put the Soybean: Innovative Insulation article up on their web site for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!

Humphrey House in TOH

After adding soy-foam insulation to our kitchen remodel, we were contacted by This Old House magazine to ask us about the experience. Well, they wrote up our interview in a Q&A format in their "Green House" column in the July/August magazine issue. We just found out that the issue is entering newstands and mailboxes. Hooray!



And although this photo might imply otherwise, you can not eat the foam! :-)

Subzero Winter Temps are no match for Foam

Despite the blustery winter chill gripping Chicago this weekend, our kitchen has been remarkably cozy and warm. It turns out our foam insulation installer was right - Harsh winds are stopped outside our home from coming in while we merrily continued to finish the cabinet installation and hook up some of our lighting fixtures. Jen is really excited about the lights, so I'll let her post about it along with some photos soon.

But, i just wanted to let everyone know that if you're considering different types of insulation and live in a place with harsh climates, I encourage you to consider foam insulation (or in our case, soy foam).

Soy-Based Foam Insulation

Our kitchen will be the warmest and quietest place in our house, thanks to the new soy foam insulation now expanding in our walls. The stuff is really neat to see go in and even better once installed.
Soy-based foam is made by BioBased, and expands about 100 times its original size to fill every nook and cranny in the walls, better than any kind of rolled insulation. Unlike traditional fiberglass insulation, which even though it holds thermal energy in, teh foam also stops air leakage. This will be especially welcome in the cold and drafty kitchen nook addition (located over a crawlspace).

And no, just because it's made from soybeans doesn't mean it's edible to people (or critters for that matter). We chose a soy product because, while there are other spray foam insulation available, this is the only one that is not oil-based (urethane), and it is a water-based spray, so it truly is sustainable and green. It doesn't even smell bad when they're spraying it. Loking

For our project, we needed to get a minimum R-19 in the walls to meet code requirements, so we went with a "closed-cell" version, which provides an effective R-value of 5.5 per inch! What does all this mean? Well for our kitchen, we won't need to have as many heat leads cutting into the floor, and we should see a big impact in terms of lower utility bills. We may not drop 50% like a whole-house (new construction) would get, but it will still be significant for this old house.

And as we've also discovered, it's an awesome noise barrier. When we checked it out last night, the room was almost dead silent. It will be nice to not hear the ambulances running down our neighboring street on the way to the hospital anymore!


There is video on BioBased's website that shows much better than I can explain how this all works. But if you're in the Chicago area and interested in checking out soy foam insulation for your home project, I recommend contacting Renewable Resource Insulation to see how they might be able to help. One note: this does need to be applied to open-cavity walls (studs). They don't yet have a product that can be injected inside existing walls, but I'm told it's in the works.