Virginia Insulation Company Helps Homeowners Slash Utility Costs with Spray Foam

FAIRFAX, VA - April 25, 2011 - Homeowners in the U.S. got some good news this week: New home sales rose by nearly four percent, indicating that the housing industry might be back on track after suffering one of the worst drops in its history following the effects of the financial crisis. More new homes are built to adhere to the strictest environmental guidelines, and more contractors are using spray foam to help increase the energy efficiency of new homes.

In Virginia, homebuilders and contractors alike are employing the latest in green strategies as they work to boost the value of homes they work on to make them more attractive to potential buyers. While solar panel systems and specialized lighting systems garner a lot of attention as energy savers, many home experts assert it's actually spray foam insulation that produces the greatest payback for the lowest costs.

Spray foam is a cheap alternative to installing a photovoltaic system and can help homeowners to slash their monthly utility bills, according to experts. Dustin Derrick, the owner and general manager of Evergreen Insulation, has been using spray foam for years and told the Roanoke Times that it has helped a number of his clients to cut their heating and cooling bills and increase the value of their homes.

Evergreen Insulation specializes in environmentally friendly updates to homes and employs spray foam in nearly all of its energy efficiency retrofits, Derrick said. According to Derrick, the company uses spray foam to seal places where hot and cold air usually escape from, normally around doors and windows and in the foundation.

Often, Evergreen will use a number of options when updating a home's infrastructure to ensure that hot and cold air can't leak from cracks that are often missed by the naked eye. "There's places that want to use fiberglass," Derrick told the newspaper. "There's places that want to use cellulose and there's places we advise to use spray foam. And we may use all three products on the same house."

Derrick asserts that using spray foam gives his clients a less expensive alternative to other insulating choices. Moreover, spray foam is incredibly effective and can help homeowners drastically cut their utility bills. Though the initial costs associated with the green insulating products are greater than standard treatments, the long-term savings make them a great investment, he said. Normally, homeowners recoup any costs within three to five years.

Recently, the company performed energy efficiency upgrades to a high-bay farm maintenance building owned by Arvid Myklebust, a full-time cattle farmer and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech in mechanical engineering. Myklebust is an expert in the application of such treatments and he has repeatedly used the company to perform fixes on his home and outhouses.

Like a true engineer, Myklebust illustrated the relationship between the spray foam upgrades in his home to the cost savings he experienced this past winter. "The spray foam insulation in the attic of the old, leaky part of our house has made a distinct difference in the heating requirements this winter," Myklebust affirmed. "If Evergreen and this technology had been there when I built the new portion of our house, I surely would have used them."