More Than a Mansion! SPF Takes Georgia Model Home to New Heights

By Jack Innis

When SPF contractor and distributor Dale Ledbetter heard about a 15,000-square-foot mansion being built as a model for a series of 27 custom homes in northern Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, he knew he had to get involved.

This project would be one of those rare instances where an SPF contractor could pull out all the stops. From a sealed roofing envelope to an acoustically correct 1,800-square-foot home theater, this job would have to make the owner — and his potential home buyers — fall in love with a product they could not see.

Ledbetter, head of Marietta’s Profoam Distribution, heard about the modern mansion after attending a trade show. HeartLand Builders Inc. had sent a representative to the show, who had returned to the office with a fistful of cards and brochures.

Even though they had already received a great proposal from another SPF contractor, HeartLand invited Ledbetter and Shannon Trigg, owner of Foam Plus, to bid on the job. Staying involved with projects throughout the Southeast, Ledbetter chiefly distributes Profoam products, sets up new contractors and promotes the spray foam business.

With an extensive background in SPF, roofing and acoustics — and a burning desire to get involved with this project — Ledbetter and Trigg won the bid on the seven-bedroom, 12-bathroom home by offering a few things their competition couldn’t.

A Little AC, a Lot of SPF

Once the roof sheeting went down, Trigg was up in the attic, spraying Profoam’s Proseal SFC 1.9 pounds-per-square-foot, closed-cell polyurethane between the beams and rafters. The low-density foam using Honeywell’s HFC-245a blowing agent, expanded to about three inches throughout most of the house and attic. But the attic had a curious design feature: There were no ventilation cutouts.

“I know this goes against what many builders have been taught, but I’ve been fighting this for years,” says Ledbetter. After growing up in the roofing repair industry and spending nearly a decade applying SPF, Ledbetter has learned a thing or two about roof failure and insulation.

“When shingles fail, it’s usually because there is no insulation,” Ledbetter says. “The attic is 140°F, the humidity is around 100 percent and the shingles are baking from underneath. They’re designed to sit in the sun, not to sit on top of an oven, cooking.”

Completely encapsulating the attic creates a static air bubble that goes a long way to keeping the house cool. SPF under the roof prevents more than 90 percent of heat transfer into the attic. Closed-cell foam in the rafters prevents unwanted humidity from encroaching.

“We get calls all the time from contractors who have climbed up into attics we’ve done and asked if the attic was air conditioned,” Ledbetter says. Often, the attic is barely warmer than the house. Customers fearful of moisture buildup can rest easy, he says. “Some people believe that moisture in the house ends up in the attic. You can’t produce that much moisture by just living in a house. Moisture won’t go through sheet rock. If it did, the sheet rock would just fall off your wall,” Ledbetter explains.

“Another important factor in keeping moisture levels down throughout the structure is to properly downsize the air conditioner. When a big AC unit comes on, it cools the house rapidly, but cycles back off quickly. The unit’s dehumidifier doesn’t get a chance to pull much moisture from the house. A smaller AC unit runs longer and pulls the humidity levels down, suggests Ledbetter.

“If you cut the unit size in half and allow a little longer run time, you haven’t increased your utility bills because you’ve got a smaller unit, but you can control the atmosphere inside your house.”

Using this design, Ledbetter has weaned numerous clients off of humidifiers, dehumidifiers and fresh-air exchangers. “If the AC unit is sized correctly, that’s all you have to have. Compare this to putting a power ventilator in the attic. You turn that on, and it creates negative pressure in the attic, which pulls the conditioned air out of the house through the ceiling. Plain and simple, that’s just how it works. We’re not guessing; we’ve got eight years of experience with this,” he says.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Virtually no expense was spared in constructing the home. The spec mansion featured a Rinnai tankless water heater, Boise-engineered silent wood floors, Solartube skylights, Viking appliances, and an AVI-designed home theatre and video library. Ledbetter and Trigg teamed up to make the 30- by 60-foot home theater acoustically correct.

SPF contractors can help homeowners gain an acoustical edge by understanding how sound travels, Ledbetter believes. With schooling in acoustical engineering and a few sound-studio construction projects under his belt, he feels that sound attenuation is fairly basic, provided foam contractors don’t promote their products as soundproof.

High-frequency sounds tend to travel in a straight line and die. Bass sounds bounce around and move throughout buildings.

“If you’ve ever walked from a distance toward an outdoor concert, the first thing you hear is the bass notes. It’s the same with bass sounds inside a house. If you put up a reflective product up on the wall, the bass will bounce around the room and sound muddy. You don’t want to have a fantastic sound system that doesn’t sound right or that you can hear in another part of the house.”

Since the mansion’s media room is in the basement, Trigg sprayed three inches of 1.9-pound rigid foam on the subterranean room’s ceiling and walls. The ceiling then received an additional five inches of Profoam’s 0.5-pound water-blown Profill SHS.

Beyond adding to the structure’s strength, the composite foam layer will reduce reverberations passing through. “We shouldn’t get a lot of bass bouncing throughout the room, and we should be pretty successful stopping sound from seeping out of the room. If the sound passes through the closed cell, we’re hoping it bounces off the rigid foam,” Ledbetter explains.

Ledbetter cautions SPF contractors against making too many acoustic promises.

To get proper acoustics, you have to frame the structure entirely differently. “We get calls all the time asking if we can soundproof something, and we say no,” he says. “Unless the structure itself is built to stop acoustic travel, you’re not going to be able to stop the sound with foam. The customer’s going to call you back, and you’re going to wind up giving them the job.”

Future Foamers of America
A few years ago, Ledbetter and his partners came to a business crossroads. They were handling as many spraying jobs as they could, distributing their own foam and helping a growing number of contractors get started in the SPF business. Something had to give! They decided to set down their spray guns and focus on creating a network of SPF contractors.

The move has paid off. So far, Profoam Distributors has set up 47 contractors in protected areas throughout the country.

Their basic program includes training and a turnkey SPF rig based on an 18-foot custom-built tandem axel trailer. Trigg, who was introduced to Ledbetter two years ago by a Graco rep, used such a rig, along with a Graco Reactor E-20 with a Fusion Purge Air Gun, to do most of the modern mansion project. Recently, Trigg ordered a second rig to service his greater Atlanta-area territory.

Ledbetter hopes another move he made recently pays off. When he learned that the earlier competing bid on the Georgia mansion was sounding sweet to the builders, he decided to comp the foam for the project with the hope of landing the other 27 homes.

What else are you going to do when you just have to get involved?

For the most part, the house’s roof insulation seems pretty standard. But this story has a few surprises in store. Since the spec mansion had a heavy slate roof, HeartLand appreciated that the roof’s rigid-cell foam (the competing bid was for open-cell foam) would provide extra stability to the framing package.

“That’s an extra benefit,” says Ledbetter. “You’re buying insulation, but you’re also getting something that provides extra rigidity to your house.”

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