SPF Crew Smells Success on College Rehab 

By: Stephanie Marie Chizik

"To anyone who has spent a winter in the north and known the depths to which the snow can reach, known the weeks when the mercury stays below zero, the first hint of spring is a major event.” 
 ~Sigurd F. Olson

To the Northland College community, the spring of 2009 won’t merely mean the arrival of fresh grass, blooms, and blossoms, but also the arrival of a “green” on-campus building.

After the Craig A. Ponzio Campus Center was built, the college noticed a few problems: The fiberglass insulation seemed to allow a few issues with the roofing system. The original fiberglass system built on the Ashland, Wisconsin, campus left voids and pockets under metal roof panels.

Located a mile off the shore of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay, condensation on campus became a problem. The college’s solution was to create a completely seamless covering on the roof panel with spray polyurethane foam (SPF).
 

Restoration: Insulation

With snow and rain frequenting Ashland, hiring not only a specialty architectural metal/roofing contractor, but also a roofing consultant, an SPF contractor, and a project manager became necessary. It was up to the Jamar Company, the on-site specialty contractor, “to bring in the right people,” explained Jamar’s project manager, Paul Zwak.
Because of the unsuccessful experience with the building’s initial insulation, the college wanted to ensure that this corrective system would fare better.
The Jamar Company, along with the college, sat down to design the best roofing system — one with a good air seal and a high R-value. With that, the Jamar Company called in Northstar Insulating Systems, Inc., to fulfill the building’s SPF needs.

Winter Green

On August 27, 1971 — 79 years after its inception — Northland College began its “green” initiative, holding its first environmental conference. Speaking was Sigurd F. Olson, the namesake for Northland’s environmental institute and author of seven books about the northern wilderness.

 “Northland College is a very environmentally friendly college,” explained Northstar’s CEO, Dave Mesojedec, even when it came to foam. “[The administrators] liked the product that we were using. It kind of fit into their view of being environmentally friendly.”

“As a recognized leader in campus sustainability, Northland College chose Icynene insulation because it is 100 percent water-blown and free from HFCs and PBDEs,” said Icynene’s Marketing Communications Supervisor, Teresa Crosato. “Icynene works as an air barrier, which will help the college reduce energy consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 50 percent, while also minimizing airborne moisture and potential problems like mold and mildew.” 

Northstar’s six-man crew arrived on site their first day at seven a.m. The general contractor had already removed the original fiberglass and took care of a few structural issues. All Northstar had to do was insulate under the roof deck and on the steel support structures to inhibit thermal transfer. The crew quickly learned that their path wouldn’t be as straight-forward as it sounded.

Something Smells Rotten

When they were ready to begin spraying, the Northstar crew parked their Kenworth truck at the base of the Campus Center. With a scuttle hole on the roof as the only way in or out, they were forced to feed their hoses into the workspace each day. It took the team an hour (with pulleys) to carry all their hoses up the outdoor, contractor-supplied scaffolding, and an hour at the end of the day to bring them back out to the truck. At 45 feet off the ground, this was a chore.

 When the Northstar crew entered the attic things started to get even tighter.From day one, the Northstar crew expected to work the entire 26,000-square-foot job in the attic’s enclosed space.

“The attic is not a normal attic,” Mesojedec said. “There’s so much HVAC equipment up there that it was pretty complex to get around. Because of the roof structure and the small attic access holes from the main part of the building, we had ladders brought in there while they had the hole opened into the building.” The crew spent a full day protecting all of the attic’s HVAC equipment from overspray with painters’ plastic and two-inch thermal masking tape by 3M.

They continued their usual practices with the spraying with two sprayers, two backup sprayers, and two cleaners. Each morning, when the crew met in the attic space or the truck, they let leader Mark Cardoni decide who was going to do what that day. Mesojedec depended on Cardoni to know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the sprayers, and to read how the sprayers were feeling each day. This allowed the team to spray as much as possible in a tight schedule.

“Our time was limited,” Mesojedec mused. “We could only start at seven in the morning and we needed to be done by five at night. Twice in that job, we had 35,000 boardfeet of foam in one day.”

Deciding who was going to have what role before the start of each day had another effect. By keeping track of how much work was done by each foamer every day, a sense of pride was instilled in the workers. Staying longer behind the spray gun, though, also meant risk of fatigue. To take precautions for this and other issues, the crew relied on both Cardoni’s expertise and the reliability of their safety equipment.

For the Northstar crew, this meant wearing a three-point FallTech harness, as well as 3M respirators with fresh air. All crew members wore Tyvek suits, hard hats, and safety glasses. And since the crew was forced to work primarily on the ladders, they had to make necessary safety accommodations.
“There really wasn’t too much we could do,” Mesojedec said. “We had to hook our [harness] lines up to the beams we would be spraying. The area didn’t lend itself to any other way of doing it.” But that didn’t mean the Northstar crew could cut corners.

“The college was very particular about having a clean working environment,” Mesojedec said.

The SPF team then sprayed four inches of Icynene insulation to the underside of the deck. They used a Graco H40 proportioner with 410 feet of heated hose and a Gusmer 20/35 with 310 feet of heated hose to reach the walls’ heights. The hoses fed into their Graco Fusion guns with 01 round tips.
After a week of spraying, the crew returned with the vapor retarder. It took them one day to spray a four-mil (WFT) layer of Benjamin Moore’s Super Spec Latex Vapor Barrier Primer Sealer 260. They used two Graco airless sprayers for this step . . . until they were forced to stop production.

 “They were concerned about any kind of fumes or anything coming up, and that never was an issue until we got to the vapor retarder,” Mesojedec explained. “As soon as they could smell something, they wanted to know if the foam we were spraying could be harmful.” Once the smell — the latex primer and not the SPF — was explained to the college’s representative, though, the SPF team was permitted to return to work.

“It was very easy to deal with them,” Mesojedec exclaimed. “They listened to us. It was an interesting project for us, and we just enjoyed the chance to work with the college and Jamar on it. Everything was ready for us like they said it was going to be. We didn’t have to move other people’s stuff out of the way.”

For this SPF crew, the support they received from the college, contractor, and Director of Facilities and Maintenance made their hectic rehab job possible.

 “We could get our job done,” Mesojedec finished. "It was nice to be on that project.”
 

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