Seal Leaks from a Distance with Great Stuff WIDE Spray (Building Resilience)

A one-part canned foam that can seal wide swaths of  leaky framing assemblies, like rim joists

Welcome back to Building Resilience, a show about whole-house solutions for extreme climate, healthy homes, and sustainability.  Last time, we were in a basement installing AHF's glue-down engineered wood flooring.  

Michael Anschel:
The world of engineered wood flooring is vast and complicated. And there's a lot to know.

Everything from the top layer. Is it an image? Is it a solid product? How thick is that product? What's the center made out of? Is it a one-layer, two-layer, four-layer, seven-layer core? Is the bottom cork? Is it MDF? Is it a glue down?  All of these things can change what you choose. Now, in this case, what we chose was a product that the top layer is actually made out of a densified red oak.

And densified basically uses a combination of heat and pressure to increase the hardness by more than double, making this the perfect resilient choice for this house. 

Wide Spray canned foam works from a distance

Today, we're gonna seal some gaps against air leaks. But first, we're gonna test out Great Stuff's new Wide Spray product in a dumpster.

In case we make a mess.  

So when we're trying out a new product, uh, rather than, well, I'm afraid of making a mess in the client's house. So, we decided that the dumpster was the best place to try out the new product. Dan set up a little obstacle course for me with a gap of two inches, and a consistent gap of between six inches and an inch and a half to see how they feel is this is gonna go quickly, I expect. 

There's six, there's eight inches. That's eight inches; that's twenty inches. I'm gonna start at eight. 

Wide Spray seals gaps from a distance with a tight or wide bead. 

It turns out to be a pretty tidy little process, so we're going inside.  

Unboxing Great Stuff Wide Spray

So, we're all familiar with DuPont and their Great Stuff line of foam products. We have their low-expansion foam that we use around our windows and doors for air sealing. We've got their gap and crack filler for gaps up to an inch.

A newer product, their Wide Spray foam sealant, is a pretty cool product. It's got a bunch of new features, most notably that you can spray from some distance, up to 20 inches. The product comes in a box like this with two of the canisters and a series of nozzles. There are two types of nozzles in here.

One of them is going to be a cone-tip type nozzle. That's going to give us a round application. The other is a fan tip, and the fan tip actually comes with a little dial. So I can turn it and adjust the angle of the fan spray when I'm spraying.  It also comes with instructions on the top of the box, which is super handy, so you can never say you didn't have the instructions. 

There's a bunch of things that are unique about this product. Um, first, it's a moisture-cured product, which means that when we apply it to a surface that might be wet, the foam will still cure nicely. Unlike a lot of our other foam products, which are chemically cured, we need those substrates to be very, very dry.

This, in fact, will do better if the substrate is a little bit wet.  We always want to make sure that we are shaking our foam products for at least 60 seconds before applying it. That's so that we mix the blowing agent with the foam chemical itself.  The other important piece is that when we apply it, we have the can facing down.

This ensures that the blowing agent mixes with the foam, and we actually get a full disbursement of the product. If you spray it like this, the gas will come out, and the foam will stay in the can, and we don't want that. Let's get shakin'. 

To thoroughly mix the foam and gas, 

We'll be doing this for a long time!

Shake the can for a full 60 seconds. 

Applying foam sealant in a basement: cone tip and fan tip

With the Great Stuff all shook up, he puts on a pair of gloves to cover up his skin and fancy watch. It's important to cover your skin because while this stuff is great, it's also sticky.

And we hit the crawlspace.  Beginning with the cone tip,  he seals the cracks and obvious leak spots, keeping the can upside down while spraying. 

Then, he switches to the fan tip to cover a problem area toward the lower part of the wall. The tip swivels left and right so you can shoot vertically or horizontally or somewhere in between.  While there certainly is an R-value inherent in Great Stuff Wide Spray, this product is not an insulation product, so it shouldn't be considered a replacement for froth packs. 

One-part canned foam is different from two-part froth packs

Also different is how the foam cures. Froth packs use a two-part foam that mixes at the tip and cures on contact. 

Well, if we open up the box of froth pack, inside, we're going to find, uh, we have a gun with two hoses.  We have a series of nozzles. I'll talk about those in a second. And below that, we have two canisters.

Chemical A and Chemical B.  So, chemical A is an isocyanate. Chemical B is a polyol. And the two, when they come together, they create foam. And that's what we're after. The two chemicals travel independently through these two hoses until they reach the nozzles. And they give you two different kinds of nozzles for two different kinds of applications. 

This nozzle, the blue one, has a fan tip. So if I'm spraying like a rim joist or a wall cavity where I need a big wide spray, I will use a fan tip.

This is like a fill tip. If I'm spraying to fill a large opening or a weight pocket, I will use this tip. Both of them have this very cool spiral deal here, which allows the chemicals to still maintain their separation up until they reach the very last point where they mix, and they instantly start to react as they come out of the tip.

Great Stuff Wide Spray is a one-part foam and cures on contact with moisture in the air. You can spritz the surface of the wall or the surface of the foam if you're applying it in exceptionally dry conditions, but it's usually not necessary.  

If you're primarily concerned with air sealing a small area, these cans are full of some pretty great stuff,  just like this show.