The insulation was finally done, and it couldn’t have been soon enough. It’s amazing how expensive it is to heat a house with no insulation in the basement..

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using a spray-in foam insulation (HeatLok, though I wasn’t looking for a particular brand when finding a contractor to do it, it’s just the one mine - Frontenac Foam Insulation - used). There are some great benefits to this stuff:

• High R-value per inch (this stuff is around R-7 per inch - compare to fibre-glass batt insulation, at about R-2.5 per inch);
• Doesn’t take up much space. I was able to use 2×4 framing, and only put the frame out about an inch from the cement wall. With fibre-glass or rigid insulation, I’d have to build out a thicker wall, possibly using 2×6’s, and effectively make the room a tiny bit smaller. When you don’t have a ton of space to begin with, losing 20 sqft is significant.
• No vapour barrier required.
• Easy to install. Well, aside from the fact I had a contractor do it for me, it’s easy to install on uneven walls because it just conforms to the wall shape. Since I had some parts of the cement sticking out farther from the frames when they poured it, as well as a brick/wood framed half wall at the front of the house (see pics below), it would have been very difficult to install rigid insulation, since if you leave air gaps between the insulation and the concrete, you can have moisture problems.

On the downside, it is quite a bit more expensive than other types of insulation, however, I hope to offset this with a grant from the eco-Energy Retrofit Program. Unfortunately, I had this done just days before the recently-announced federal renovation tax credit, so I can’t qualify for that.

It took them about 40 minutes to warm up the foam in the truck before starting (it was about -15°C out), and about 2.5 hours to install it all. They basically have a big truck with a tank full of foam in it, and a pump, and then a long hose coming inside to a spray gun, which mixes the components of the foam and I think uses compressed air to spray the foam onto the wall, where it then expands.

Here are some before/after pictures:

The front of my house has an overhang, and so they put foam all inside that as well.

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a draft in the far corner, where it was hard to get the nozzle in (they actually had to notch out a piece of the frame to get inside, which you can see in the pic below). Before they left, they mentioned that it might not have gotten all the way back, so they came back a few days later with a type of foam that expands more and actually filled all the headers in, and now there are no drafts and it is very warm.

The first foam they put in (blue) feels like hard styrofoam. The higher-expanding stuff (yellow) feels a lot squishier. As to be expected, this made a huge improvement in not only the basement temperature but in the overall house temperature, and my furnace runs a lot less often now. A bit unexpected, the basement is actually warmer than the main floor of the house now!

You can also see why I was trying to get anything that needed a hole outside done before the insulation (like the bathroom vent - compare to this picture); not that it is impossible now, it just means I would have to drill through an extra few inches of foam, and then seal it all back up again when I’m done.

I have most of the wiring run, concentrating on the outside walls since it needs to be done before insulation. The laundry room has its own circuit (GFCI-protected), and there is also a light in the furnace room/closet. There are 8 plugs in the rec-room area (since I’ll be using it as my office space, I wanted lots of plugs), on two separate circuits. There is also another separate circuit for all the lights.

I also ran a new plug outside, as I did not have a plug in the back yard, and a new wire to the plug beside my driveway. The driveway plug has been unhooked since shortly after I moved in and found a scary/confusing contraption involving old NM wire, extension cord plugs, and a switch, branched off from another random circuit. I unfortunately didn’t take a picture of this, but I didn’t really want it hooked up (especially not when I had to get an electrical inspection done for insurance). The outside plugs are on their own dedicated circuit.

I have another outside plug on the front of the house which is tied into a circuit shared with a bedroom and some lights. I was going to run a new circuit for it, but the wires were routed in a way that made it impossible to fish a new wire through, and there was no way to legally put in a junction box to use the existing wires. In the end I decided it was not a big deal, so I just left it.

One of the last things I had to remove from the original basement were the plugs for the washer and dryer. Both of them were mounted on a piece of wood, directly on the cement foundation, so of course they had to be moved before the insulation could be sprayed in.

The wires for both of these old circuits were aluminum. I kept the dryer wire, and just ran it to a new insulated box, mounted lower down the wall (luckily there was a few extra feet up in the header area, for some reason). Aluminum is really not too bad to work with. The biggest thing is that all connections need to have an anti-oxidant paste applied to them, and they need to be connected using aluminum-rated parts. In this case I’m just using the old dryer plug, which is CO/ALR-rated. The picture here is me applying the paste before connecting the wires.

Once finished, I pulled the mounting boards off the wall and removed the old wire.

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While I was removing the old washing machine wire, I came across a part of it that was covered by black tape, tucked up in the header above the window. I took the tape off, and found a cut with some exposed wiring (it’s just the ground, but even so..). You never know what you’re going to find, and had I never replaced this wire, I probably never would have noticed.

Since there is no window in the basement bathroom, I’m adding an exhaust vent to it. I’m using a 90 CFM fan which is rated at 0.5 somes (which is almost silent) - although I’m putting it through 3″ duct instead of 4″, which I believe drops the rating to 80 CFM (still more than enough) and makes it slightly louder.

Of course the exhaust air needs a place to go, so that meant adding a new vent. One thing I learned: big drill + putting a hole in the side of the house; not something girlfriends like to be involved with. I used a 3.25″ hole saw, which did the job nicely.

I used flexible duct, and some foil tape and clamps to keep everything together. It’s starting to get crowded in the electrical closet as you can see.

The outside vent and the fan itself both have dampers built-in, so I’m hoping I won’t have any issues with cold air coming down. I’ve checked on a couple of cold, windy day’s we’ve had lately, and can’t feel anything so it looks promising. In my old apartment, the exhaust fan either had no damper (or it was broken), and it was quite awful during the winter to feel the -20 degree air blowing on you first thing in the morning.