The History of Spray Foam Insulation

Although spray foam insulation as you may know it today truly emerged during the 1980s, spray foam actually have their roots several decades further previously, beginning with the creation of polyurethane foam from the 1940s by Otto Bayer.

Otto Bayer, a commercial chemist, actually began dealing with polyurethane in Germany during the late 1930s. This technology was brought to the us in early 1940s by David Eynon, the president of Mobay, a war effort conglomerate created from the partnering of two chemical industry giants, Monsanto along with the Bayer Corporation. Although Otto Bayer worked for Bayer Corporation, he had not been related to the company's founding family.

Over the 1940s, polyurethane polymers were used primarily in military and aviation applications. The production of war machines for your The Second World War conflict drove the majority of the uses of these high-grade plastic polymers throughout the war.



It had been not up until the 1950s that polyurethane began for use in home based insulation. It was actually the invention of your "Blendometer" that allowed for expansion of polyurethane application for the home insulation realm. The Blendometer was the first machine in a position to mix components for the creation of polyurethane foam and came to be by Walter Baughman in 1953.

The Blendometer allowed for your strategic mixing of chemicals to create what Baughman known as a plastic elastomer or an expanding foam. Liquid when applied, this plastic elastomer expanded right into a thick foam and consequently hardened upon drying.

Baughman's Blendometer was still a partially manual process, with humans tilting trays of chemicals to combine foam. Even though the machine did enable the utilization of polyurethane in home insulation as well as in other home-related applications, like ac unit insulation, it absolutely was still a technology in their infancy and something that made widespread utilization of polyurethane to be a residential insulation material no less cumbersome.

Polyurethane polymers were used in numerous means during the entire following decades, with incredible advancements being made in the car industry uses of the content particularly. However, it might be a lot more than two decades before the foam would become widely used in home based insulation processes.

Building on Baughman's invention, the primary dedicated spray technology machine was constructed in 1963 by Fred Gusmer. The 1960s and 1970s saw technological advancements which made spray foam's used in home insulation easier achievable and affordable.

It was actually also within the 1970s that the very idea of the "super insulated" home emerged. Largely driven from the energy crisis of your 1970s, home builders and homeowners alike began to search for strategies to boost the energy efficiency of homes.

The crisis fueled advancements in technology that laid the building blocks for modern spray foam applications. It had been the roll-out of advanced spray nozzle technology that allowed spray foam insulation for use widely in home construction and improvement projects.

spray foam insulation company foam nozzle allows the foam mixture along with the chemical responsible for its expansion capabilities to be separated until just prior to application. The spray foam mixture consists of several key components yet it is the expansion chemical, isosynate, which accounts for its easy application and expansive character.

The applying nozzle allows the foam mixture and also the isosynate to be shipped to the nozzle through separate hoses, mixing only seconds before being sprayed. The spray foam arrives at its destination like a liquid but quickly expands right into a foam substance and later dries in to a hardened plastic upon curing.

The 1980s and early 1990s saw a great deal of controversy within the spray foam insulation industry as different marketing schemes from various companies promoted the key benefits of closed verses open foam insulation so that as some companies attempted to market water blown foam application processes.

Though there has been much debate inside the industry, R-value standards, used to be a measure of determining energy efficiency, have cleared up a great deal of the controversy. R-value ratings clearly define closed foam as the most efficient means of making a home as energy efficient as possible.

Closed cell spray foam has additionally been added to this list of building requirements for creating homes in hurricane and earthquake zones more structurally sound. The improved stability of homes insulated with spray foam technology makes the utilization of spray foam an intelligent move for virtually any homeowner no matter geographic location.