There are more manufacturers selling more brands of spray foam systems than ever before, which is driving the contractor price down, the contractors are passing that opportunity along to the end-user (homeowners and builders) in a market that is demanding higher and higher insulation performance—but is this a good thing?

Beware of Spray Foam in a Can—The Imposters

The rise in spray foam manufacturers is driving prices down, but contractors are losing margins by competing on price instead of focusing on the product's value. Harris warns that some off-shore manufacturers are falsely marketing sealants as insulation without proper U.S. certification, risking the use of inferior products in the market.

Not necessarily, says Harris. “They’re giving up all the margin they could be keeping in order to compete with the lowest quality contractor down the road.  We don’t seem to appreciate we’ve got the best insulation in the game compared to other insulations, and contractors can’t seem to close business based on higher product value or contractor competency.  Most sales are still made on price.”

OK, so the consumer is getting the best product at the lowest price. Isn’t that what they want?

“They may not be getting what they want,” says Harris, as he provides an example. “Let’s take single-component polyurethane foam cans as an example. These are the cans of foam we can buy at the big box stores, construction material suppliers or directly off the internet.  They should be used exclusively for sealing around doors, windows or filling small holes in framing or sealing framing.  They are pretty common these days.  But these single-component foam-in-a-can are not supposed to be used for insulation.”

And these products are made in America by well-known American manufacturers and meet U.S. construction codes based on U.S. testing and certification process, he explains. They have all the approvals and documentation on their websites.

So what’s the issue?

Well, Harris says, since spray foam insulation is such a great product every manufacturer wants a piece of the action—even off-shore manufacturers.  We now have off-shore single component sealant manufacturers calling their products “insulation” and promoting it as insulation, and even showing videos of how to use it as insulation, without testing it to U.S. standards or having it certified or evaluated or even looked at by an authority.  They just give the sealant a new brand name, stick a tip on the end of the dispense tube which makes a wide pattern and call it an insulation.  And consumers, including material distributors, buy it without checking any of the properties or testing. For some of this stuff, you can’t even get a Safety Data Sheet from the importer, manufacturer or distributor.

Read the Technical Data Sheet – there’s likely a few physical properties listed – like R-value. Make sure these test results state the test procedure that was used to measure the property.  The test method needs to be accepted in the United States.