Spray Foam Helps the Cincinnati Zoo Go Platinum
  By: Claire Trageser

Photos courtesy of HGC Construction Company.

At the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, visitors can find Malayan tigers, Maasai giraffes, Sumatran rhinos, red pandas, ring-tailed lemurs, and…spray polyurethane foam (SPF)!

In May, construction was completed on the 134-year-old zoo’s brand new entrance, called the Historic Vine Street Village. The $19.6-million project used solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, a solar water-heating system, and, of course, SPF, to create membership/ticketing and gift shop buildings that use 78 percent less energy than standard structures.

These innovations helped the zoo receive the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum certification for new construction, the highest level of the council’s environmental ranking system. The award makes the Cincinnati Zoo just the second zoo in the United States to receive platinum certification for new construction, and the first project in Cincinnati to be platinum-certified.
For Mark Fisher, the zoo’s senior director of facilities and planning, the decision to use SPF was a no-brainer.



“It was all about long-term payback,” he said. “I was at GreenBuild a couple of years ago, and I saw several demonstrations of the product. After doing some of my own research, I was sold.”

Fisher has more than 10 years of experience in the commercial construction agency, and said that time made him wary of traditional insulation.

“If there is one thing that I can say for certain, it is that traditional insulation is never installed properly, and I mean never,” he said. “Insulation is typically seen as nothing more than a pesky obstacle that stands in the way of the drywall guys.  It is put in hastily, which is why you get 20 to 30 percent infiltration numbers with traditional insulation. The spray foam does a pretty good job of taking the infiltration problem out of the equation.”
However, to ensure that the air infiltration was eliminated, Fisher needed the insulation installation to be flawless.

“Being that (spray foam) is two to three times as expensive, you can bet that our general contractor and I were diligent in quality control, making sure that we got what we paid for before the sheetrock crew came on board,” he said.

 Fisher and the general contractor, HGC Construction Company, turned to Cincinnati-based Priority 1 Construction Services for the spray foam application.

The two-man crew from Priority 1 spent one week installing 0.5-pound open-celled Icynene LC-C-50 foam on new extruded polystyrene insulation and 2-by-6-inch steel studs in the 7,000-square-foot (650.3 m2) gift shop and 4,000-square-foot (371.6 m2) membership/ticketing building. The SPF gave the zoo walls an R-value of 21—much higher than in a wall system using batt insulation, according to Jerry Muchmore, the senior project manager of HGC.

“(The foam) adheres to surfaces like glue, sealing out air infiltration,” he said. “The majority of the improved performance of this product over batt insulation is the huge reduction of air infiltration through the wall system and the elimination of insulation voids, which are common with batts.”

The Priority 1 crew used a gooseneck 24-foot (7.3 m) trailer and Graco/Gusmer guns to apply the foam. They wore full-face masks, supplied air respirators (SARs), and protective coveralls supplied by Cincinnati-based ABCO Safety. The job ran very smoothly, said Barry Kirby, the project manager from Priority 1.
In fact, the biggest challenge was similar to that experienced by most visitors to a zoo: parking.

“The hardest part was getting the trailer situated into the area,” said Kirby.  “It was tight; not a lot of space nearby.”

To get around this issue, Kirby’s crew would arrive early in the morning. By the end of the week, their early rising, along with the careful planning from Fisher, Muchmore, and the project’s architect, Dean Violetta from Cornette/Violetta Architects, LLC, paid off.

Although spray foam insulation is more expensive than batt insulation, Fisher said he expects the zoo will get a return on its investment in five years.

“When you can couple high-quality insulation like spray foam with technology such as geothermal heat pumps, all of a sudden you are looking at 70 percent or more energy savings when compared to the standard building,” he said. “And our energy modeling showed that the premiums that we paid for our spray foam and geothermal system would be in the five-year range.  Here at the Cincinnati Zoo, our design standard is 100 years, so I’ll take a five-year pay back all day.”
     

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