Builder Sprayed Insulation All Over Furnace In Attic

This puts the furnace in at least semi conditioned space.

Builder sprayed insulation all over furnace in attic. Most often the attic is sealed by installing spray foam insulation at the roofline thus bringing the attic inside the building enclosure and turning it into conditioned space directly or indirectly. In a proper spray foam job a contractor doesn t just spray foam all over the top of your attic and go home. A case of incompatibility. If the air is not piped in directly to the furnace the attic space would be considered the plenum.

A while back i wrote about the incompatibility of putting an atmospheric combustion furnace in a sealed attic. They also need to seal off areas of air leakage to the outdoors. A furnace in the attic is a design that works for all homes. You can build a small enclosure around the furnace with rigid foam insulation then pick up the insulation on the ceiling inside the enclosure.

The attic is the worst place to install hvac equipment and duct work. The attic floor needs an insulation value of r30 40. A plenum is the source of combustion air. A lot of builders and homeowners are going with spray foam insulation because of the airtightness benefits.

Any existing batt or roll insulation in the attic should have the facing against the attic drywall floor or no facing at all. If you pipe the air in directly to the furnace and it does not use attic space air then you can use sprayfoam. If you don t have a crawl space or a basement then it can be a challenge to place a furnace on the ground floor of the structure. Batt or rolled insulation or blown loose fill insulation fiberglass or cellulose can be installed on top of old insulation.

Otherwise humidity will quickly creep into your attic. If the builder says that will cost more then use the money you would have spent on the foam insulation and attic enclosures to do this. Gable vents and soffits are the big culprits here. She asked me to go into the attic to find the roof leaks or where the snow is blowing in through the soffits.

I found instead a vintage 3 ton ac unit with 1 rigid insulation taped all over it and insulated flex duct snaking all over the poorly insulated attic. The rigid insulation was saturated from condensation. Insulation should be rolled out perpendicular to the joists and unfaced rolls should be used. But then the questioner mentioned that the spray foam contractor had intentionally left big holes to the outside by not sealing the gable vents.