Episode 41: The Realities of Spray Foam Insulation with Steve Hodgson, Steve Hodgson Building Consultancy

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: On this week’s episode, we have Steve Hodgson from Steve Hodgson Building Consulting. Thank you very much for coming on. No problem, Matt. It’s a pleasure to

Steve Hodgson: be here.

Matt Nally: Do you want to introduce yourself first, and then I’ll come on to yeah, what we’re covering today.

Steve Hodgson: Oh gosh, I hate this sort of thing.

Yeah, my name’s Steve Hodgson. I’ve been around the damp control industry in one form or another since I was 19 years old. And after a decade in contracting, I went to the property care association. And a bit of greasy pole climbing and a bit of, Backstabbing, I ended up being the CEO and I left that position in in November last year and I’ve really gone back to what I think I was always made to do, which is rooting around in buildings and taking all the things that I’ve learned for all those years at the PCA, learning from other people’s mistakes and applied them to my own business now.

So yeah, I’m out on my own and loving every minute of it.

Matt Nally: Awesome. Awesome. One of the things I know you covered quite a lot. Or correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you did was spray foam. And I wanted to come back to this. So I know it’s been a topic historically that’s been covered quite a lot.

And then like everything, something else comes up like RAAC concrete, or I don’t know, new standards, something gets in the way of that, the noise around it. And It’s popped up again this week in the news with, the reports of lenders, not not lending on homes with spray foam. So I think across the episode, we’ll talk about, yeah, types of spray foam and removal and the future of it.

But yeah, so should we start with. As we start with that piece that’s just come out around people not lending and then come on to the types of spray foam and risks and realities around it.

Steve Hodgson: Yeah, absolutely. I was approached by a journalist probably about three months ago, originally, who was interested because it’s been kicking around.

It’s never really gone away and people are being affected by it. Can see him. Protection programs are getting calls from from concerned consumers who feel as though they’ve been ripped off in various ways and are struggling to sell or process their properties or raise capital. So a journalist gave me a call and asked if I could provide them with any sort of details.

Technical background and chat about it. What was interesting about this one is that she approached it by speaking to the top 20 lenders and finding out what their attitude towards polyurethane foam was. And she found that pretty much everybody said. that they would deal with it, they would lend on it.

But actually when it really came down to it, when you looked inside the story the limitations and the expectations of those lenders meant that really there’s only three or four that would actively without reservation. Accept the information that was being provided and provide loans, the underlying sort of story here is that, that lenders and particularly equity release renders are still incredibly nervous of the long term.

As well as some of the short term implications of badly designed and badly installed polyurethane foam.

Matt Nally: That’s an interesting interesting that you make those badly designed badly installed. Is that to say then actually spray, the headline you get of all spray foam is bad to simplify it.

Is that a valid statement, valid claim?

Steve Hodgson: No, Matt, absolutely. No, it’s not valid and it’s not correct. And it’s not helpful either. Polyurethane foam is. Okay, let’s dispel a few myths. I’m not anti foam. I’m not anti polyurethane. As a concept and as a project it’s absolutely brilliant because it does everything that it says on the tin.

You can’t blame a product for being used inappropriate. It does fill gaps. It does allow you to have a choice between materials that are highly moisture resistant where you want it to be and highly vapor resistant in other places while being an extremely good insulator and being dimensionally very stable and chemically very stable.

So it has lots of really good attributes. And what’s unfair and unjustified is saying all polyurethane foam in all situations is a bad idea. It has some incredibly useful applications. I looked at a property only last week for a gentleman who had spent nearly a million and a half pounds completely remodeling his house.

And as part of an architect designed solution for energy performance, the roof was completely full of polyurethane foam. But what was inside that was an air management system that meant that there was no risk of vapor drive through this material and the correct materials had been used. So the correct type of foam in the correct installations.

And yet he was trying to raise some money on a building that he owned outright. And was told by a valuer that for mortgage purposes, his very expensive house was being given a zero valuation for mortgage purposes. Now, What’s interesting is and what’s useful and where I, quite enjoy, still enjoy getting to grips with PU foam is being able to go to a property like that and being able to do the work and do the observations to absolutely show a lender that this is not a problem and actually Perversely, if you damage the foam, if you take the foam out, you’ll actually have a fundamentally ruining effect on the building because you’ll damage its ability to handle moisture.

You also damage its ability to handle heat as well. In a situation like that, this gentleman was running around like a headless chicken, wondering whether he’s going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds taking his roof off. And the truth was, damaging the foam would have absolutely mullered all the work that he’d done.

It would be far bigger than just the roof. So there’s lots of installations that are right and correct. And there’s lots of uses of the foam in particular situations that work. It’s not a bad product. It’s a product that has unfortunately in some cases been used poorly and inappropriately and installed installed despite or because of of an idea of, driving sales rather than driving quality in some areas.

And that’s what’s killed it. That’s what’s hurt the product.

Matt Nally: Yeah. And on the flip side, you’ve now got the other industry coming up of the removal side. And again, that’s got to be done in the right way. If it’s. It might be an appropriate installation, someone’s coming in to remove it, but that’s possibly something for later.

Steve Hodgson: Matt, you say it’s for later but, it’s useful to say that anybody who knocks on your door telling you that they’re going to evaluate the foam in the roof is probably not going to do that. They’re going to give you a price for removal, irrespective of what they find. And yeah, that it is worth mentioning at this point, because it’s really the dark side of what’s going on at the moment.

And the very negative byproduct of actually, trying to set the clock straight on what’s good and what’s bad is that there are people moved in taking advantage of that negative publicity and ripping people off again, but yeah, perhaps we should park it there. Come back to a bit later.

Go onto it when you feel like it. Yeah.

Matt Nally: Perfect. I suppose around the sort of in, installation and so on. It is all spray foam bad in terms of the actual type of spray foam and the different types? And is it mainly then just down to installation? That’s the problem. Or is it something else?

Steve Hodgson: No. Neither of those things, really. I’m not going to be drawn into vilifying any one type of foam. No. I guess that it’s maybe worthwhile going back to the 80s. And where I first encountered spray foam, not knowing anything like what I know now, but encountered spray foam in the sort of mean streets of Backstreet Leeds.

Where I was doing condition reports and timber and damp inspections as a contractor and going into roof voids of old terrace houses and finding polyurethane foam glued to the back of tiles. Now, it was, when it first appeared and certainly came onto my radar, it was being used as a means of extending the life of a failing roof.

And so there’s a whole Bunch of work done almost from the late 80s right through the 90s, where the principle use of polyurethane foam was a hard cell phone to extend the life of a roof that was on its way out. So that the claims were things like, we can apply this material will give you a 25 year guarantee.

Your roof will be maintenance free. Everything’s great. And to be fair, it’s a little bit like, I’m making myself unpopular by saying so it’s a bit like the rock, the rack thing, isn’t it? Rack was ever only ever supposed to be a short term fix, a cheap short term fix to a, to an issue. There’ll be something that will last 25 years and then complaining after it’s gone wrong after 50 is probably a little bit of a head melt.

Actually, this product has done exactly what it said it was going to do for 25 years, glued the roof together. The problem is now that we’re coming to the end of that period and those roofs are leaky and they’re still at the end of their design life. And when water gets in, to, in, in front, if you will, or behind a hard cell polyurethane foam system, which is intrinsically vapor resistance and incredibly good at being waterproof.

Then any water that gets in is held against the rafters and that leads and can lead to accelerated decay in a roof. So it’s not easy, however, to just say hard cell foam is bad. Hard cell foam used as a glue to stick a roof together doesn’t feel as a surveyor and somebody who, thinks about moisture and timber moisture and how they relate like a good idea.

Nor does trying to fix a leak from the inside of a from the wrong side of a leaking system. It doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. So it’s not that the foam is bad. It’s just that using a waterproof foam on a leaky roof where you’ve got timber in the way just seems like a bad idea.

dumb thing to do. So scroll forward to 2024 with those sorts of installations. It’s not really surprising that surveyors acting on behalf of purchasers would caution against buying a roof that they know they’ve had a short term fix done on it. And that’s probably coming to the end of its life and is very vulnerable to leaking water.

So on that side of things, that whole kind of historic if you like reservoir of old installs using hard cell foam probably need to be cycled out. They don’t know probably about it. They should be. Was it ever a good idea? Probably not. Anyway, it was a dumb idea. Could you be blamed for buying it if you were a relatively technically ignorant consumer being told that you can put off, spending tens of thousands of pounds on a new roof by squirting some foam around the inside that was going to glue it all together and give you a happy life for a bit.

So you dealt with that really roughly and quite dismissively as part from hard cell foam. What then happened was that the insulative qualities of the foam came to the fore. The issues with hard cell foam were lurking about, but then we started using open cell foam primarily as an insulative material.

And if you look at the in detail. at the manufacturer’s own product approval, product approval certificates from both the British Board of Agreement and Kiwa. There is an understanding, even in those earliest documents, that you have to be careful. Because, day one, lesson one at building college, when I was probably 19 years old, went something along the lines of you don’t put vapor permeable insulation or a vapor barrier on the cold side of insulation, because if you do, you get a problem.

So there was an already a recognition, even in the earliest certificates of condensation risk with that sort of buildup of materials. So there was a, there was an understanding that you should be applying vapor permeable foam to vapor bermudial backings, and also consider the amount of vapor drive into the roof and how the roof is going to manage it.

So if everything had been done as those, Data sheets required. And as the very good contractors knew and recognized, we wouldn’t have a problem, but unfortunately the kind of the interpretation of what could and should be done got mixed up. And then we had lots of entries into the market where actually we can do this.

We can apply soft cell insulating foam, converting warm roofs or sorry, cold roofs into warm roofs, we can. Get a bit of a gallop on here. We’re making lots of money. Where we’re actually, improving the thermal values of some people’s homes. There doesn’t seem to be a bad side of applying this foam to bitumen fiber felts.

But actually there always was the problem is that, as the the BRE of HSE rather document that was published just before Easter proved that some properties with that inappropriate buildup of a vapour permeable foam applied either directly to the primary roof coverings or to a vapour barrier does start to generate problems in some buildings.

So the cold feet, if you like, that surveyors had started to get about this kind of theoretical and practical moisture risk because of the incorrect location of vapor barriers started to manifest itself originally with, and as far as I could see, with the equity release companies. And the equity release companies understood that long term chronic risk and, should we be lending on a building where our stake in that building grows with time, when there is this potential for a defect that at the point at which we take control of that building, one of the major construction elements may be compromised.

So they walked away from it first. And that really meant in my own interpretation of what happened is that the rest of the valuation mortgage market caught a cold off the sniffle that the equity release companies had. And so you’ve now got a situation where that theory of that. Build up of moisture with soft cell foam gets tested by HSE that the information gets published and actually it shows that and I know it’s very, it’s a very rough interpretation of the presentation, but 25 percent of buildings in certain parts of the country with that makeup of foam onto a onto a high resisting underlay.

May be at risk of moisture buildup who wants to take that risk. So some of the time it’s cited as the reason of the for the fear is because surveyors can’t see the timbers behind the phone. For me, that’s marginal. There’s lots of things that surveyors can have an opinion on where they don’t see absolutely everything.

And how many surveyors look at a subfloor void and let know the condition of the timbers before they’ll they’ll value or before they’ll allow that to be sold and bought. So that, that lack of inspection opportunity falls away, but actually what’s real and what’s valuable because, as a purchaser of property, I’d want my surveyor to be looking after my interests and put me on notice of something where I had a 25 percent risk of failure 10 years down the future.

And so actually, for all the gobbledygook that’s talked and all the, the defenses of situations and the spray foam industry saying that it’s not fair and it’s disproportionate that there is a narrative that leads us reasonably to where we are. Whether it’s gone too far, whether the pendulum swings too far, one way or the other from time to time, that’s open to debate.

And I’m sure you can ask me questions about that, but I think I’ve spoken for too long and you want to ask me another question.

Matt Nally: No, not at all. Actually, it’s really interesting hearing that story from where it started and yeah, the change, how the misconceptions might come with it and all that sort of stuff.

That is absolutely fascinating. I think it shouts out of common misconceptions and, Potentially see people getting it right or wrong. I’m not to judge on that. But on sort of social media posts online or just news articles. But if you’re a surveyor going into a house and you’re seeing spray foam, rather than this sort of immediate sort of knee jerk reaction of, Oh my God, there’s spray foam.

We’re going to have to put a three on the roof and, or, give it a bad mortgage valuation, but there’s, what are the signs you can look for to see if it’s are there signs you can look for to save this? a good installation and if it’s the right, the appropriate building for it.

Steve Hodgson: Okay. Yes, of course there are, but how do you do that and make sure that I don’t say something stupid that’s going to provide somebody with confidence to say something that then later comes back to bite them. So I’ve got to be careful. The guidance that’s out there that the multi agency guidance that most people knows the P.

C. A. Guidance, but it isn’t that sets out a protocol for inspection investigation is still as valid as today as it was when it was produced. There’s probably some room to do a little bit of tweaking of the property care association wanted to do that. And I think there are some thoughts to do that.

But that sets up Basically a a method of looking at a building and lists the sorts of things that a surveyor ought to be looking at if they’re doing an evaluation. And so you’re looking at the type of foam, the type of building and all of that kind of stuff as well as what it’s applied to. And that’s really the critical element is not necessarily what the foam is, but what it’s been applied to and how and why.

And yes, there are a whole. Bunch of things of that nature. I guess that all of anything that I could say about inspection protocols and how you do it and how you measure it and how you go about actually fundamentally working through that that, that protocol for investigation falls on its bum.

Really, if a panel surveyor is told if you see polyurethane foam, protect us, protect yourself and walk away. Yes, you can potentially go and take a lump of the foam out and look what the underlay is. But, yesterday I was with a group of surveyors and they reminded me very quickly, we don’t do destructive tests.

We can’t go and grab a handful of foam and rip it out and look at what the underlay is. So actually, just at that very basic point of kind of how do you do an investigation, it falls on its bum because I can’t advocate destructive investigations to people doing condition reports. It doesn’t work.

And you cannot do an evaluation unless you know what’s under the foam so yeah what I would say though is if you’re looking at very modern buildings, and we’re talking about the sort of place I just mentioned where as part of a fundamental complete rebuild, they were considering how they’re going to get both air tightness and Thermal performance and make the M.

V. H. R. System Mechanical Heat Recovery Ventilation system work, then take the point of view that actually in most of those situations that foam will have been part of the overall design calculations and moisture hydrothermal evaluations that were done by the architect, and it’s probably going to be all right.

If it is a building that’s had, say, for example, an HBC certificate issued on it, NHBC specifically inside those inside those product approval certificates have a requirement, for example, to put a vapor control layer in front of the phone. If you have a vapor control layer in front of the phone, It’s going to be okay because you’re not going to get the vapor risk.

So there are certain things, particularly with those newer installations and foam as part of the design brief from the original concept of the building right through to the point of delivery, where in most of those situations, if the work has been done half well with a decent degree of supervision and some skill and care from the installer, that they are going to be low risk installs.

And I guess from some respects, that’s the bit that’s the bit that kind of at the moment I understand why consumers are quite irritated by that because They get a zero valuation. They find somebody like me. I tell them how much it’s going to cost to tell them that they know what they’ve got.

And and I don’t mind taking the PI on because I speak to a surveyor again, only a couple of weeks ago. This is how does your PI square that away? I think it’s probably the least risky thing that I do. When I’m doing timber and damper investigations and, on other things going on in the building or doing expert witness work, I take the point of view that is much more risky as far as, not knowing than doing pu foam evaluations on new buildings where everything’s there for me to see, and I understand the vapor dynamics of that building because it’s all set out for me.

So on that sort of thing, I get it on the older stuff. Okay. At the other end of the scale, what I would say is that there’s no point in me going out to look at a house, an old house, with hard sell polyurethane foam applied directly to the underside of a slate roof or a tile roof.

Because 99 times out of 100, you’re going to be advising a client that you should be making provision for a re roof. because of all the reasons I’ve just mentioned. The only bits that sit in the gray zone, if you like, are the properties that have had poly, soft cell polyurethane foam applied in the last few years to an unknown underlay.

And some of the time, even when you’ve got a vapor permeable underlay and they’ve done all the other things like remove the ceiling insulation, so you’re not getting temperature inversions in the roof where they have truly made it a warm roof space and the ventilation in the occupied spaces below is all good.

They’re the ones that sometimes I can write a positive report for. That may on first evaluation look as though we aren’t going to touch this because it’s foam. You can get those over the hump. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of properties where you’ve got foam that has been badly installed.

So there’s gaps in it. It’s neither a warm roof nor a cold roof because there are so many holes in the system. There’s insulation still left across the roof. In some cases, and it breaks my heart that I go into roof voids, where the first thing I see is I stick my head through the roof is an installation certificate for 275 millimeters of install of rock wall that was installed under a government scheme, and there’s The installer has happily signed it off, and I know that 275 millimeters of insulation in that roof is going to be absolutely fine to give them the thermal performance that they need.

And then I look further up, and then there’s a layer of badly installed polyurethane foam above it. Now, that was utterly mis sold at the point of installation. But often what you’ll also find is they’re the ones that are at risk, where you’re finding at this time of the year, high levels of moisture within the foam against the rafters and against the insulation.

The Slater’s lap. Now again, I know I’m sat in my soapbox and I’m diatribing and rattling on but let’s not pretend that roofs don’t go into condensation in winter anyway, because they all do, and we shouldn’t be concerned of some slightly elevated moisture contents. Where there’s the facility for that to burn off and it to dry out the moment the sun comes out, we get a little bit of thermal gain.

The issues really are what happens in some situations where that moisture can become cumulative because the foam is restricting that evaporation and the relative humidities in the roof are sky high because the insulation across the ceiling has called the air that’s gone into it. It’s not removed any moisture, so you’ve got very cold conditions, very high relative humidities.

So the opportunities for the corrections in those high moisture contents are minimized by the makeup of the roof. And they’re the ones that are the real problem children, if you like. And there’s a lot of them. That’s the trouble.

Matt Nally: Fine. That sounds really interesting hearing the difference between the ages and installations.

I suppose that ties me on to my next question, which is spray foam removal. How often is it that spray foam removal is appropriate and how often is it in the older properties that you mentioned, actually just it’s time for a new roof, for the reasons you mentioned. The many cases where removal is suitable.

Steve Hodgson: Okay. So that’s a really good question. I get involved. Either Mostly on the telephone. When people are saying I’m going to have removal. Can you make sure that I’m doing the right thing? Most of the time they’ve already made up their mind and they’re going to have it taken out because of the bad press or because of whatever and crack on.

If I’m ever in a roof doing an evaluation, the recommendation is you have a high risk job. You have a high risk set of circumstances, but what you have is a low moisture production because there’s only two of you rattling around in this great big mausoleum. Then I’ll tell them at some point, you’re probably going to be told you have to remove it, but actually While you’re in occupation living in the way that you do, you haven’t got a high risk situation.

And so I’ll try and talk them down a little bit, put it off for a while. The foam removal stuff is in the most part still driven by a need to do so to satisfy a lender or to satisfy a surveyor. Or the fact that actually An owner is looking after the future interests of the people that they’re leaving their house to.

That happens a lot too. So I’ll often say, it’s a risky installation, but it’s a low risk occupation. You can leave it for five, don’t do anything, leave it to your kids to sort out. And they will utterly ignore me and say, I want it taken out now. Is it useful? Yes, it is. Can it be done effectively?

Yes, it can, but not always. The one thing that really grates on me is when an installation or a foam removal company will say, we can take this out for you. And they haven’t really looked at what’s underneath the foam. So yeah, all right. It’s a piece of high vapor resisting underlay. But go and check it out.

Don’t just take a little bit off to confirm what it is. Find out how fragile it is because some of these underlays are really robust. And you can take the foam off relatively easily. It will come off without damaging the underlay. I’ve also seen installations and also advise people not to do it because actually the underlay is like gossamer.

It’s just so fragile. That you know that the minute somebody’s going to start ripping at that, the felt’s going to tear. And so they’ve spent five or six thousand pounds having a foam removal done, only to find that the under felt is completely knackered, and they’re still going to have to replace the roof anyway.

It’s not to say that there is no value and you should never remove because there is a whole bunch of instances where that’s the right thing to do. On the flip side, there are a whole bunch where you’re going to waste your money and you’re just going to say, you’ll spend money twice when you only need to suspend it once.

Don’t get me wrong. If you have to have a reroof, you’re going to have additional cost in both time and labor and waste disposal, but it’s far better to do the job once and do both things at the same time. If that’s going to be the obvious end conclusion at the only obvious end point anyway I’ve come across installations where foam removal is dead easy because the contractors have tried to staple underlay inside a roof that didn’t originally have it.

That’s done all sorts of horrible things to the moisture dynamics and the way that the roof manages its water. And in those circumstances, you can just take the strip of underlay at the top and pull it off at the bottom. You can put it right down the roof. It comes off easily. And all you’ve got is a way to just do it in a day.

So there isn’t much as I’m sure you’d like me to. There isn’t a yes or no. A response to your question. Each property really should be evaluated on its merits. And that relies on surveyors understanding what they’re doing, clients listening, and also phone removal companies being straight with clients about what their best options are, and roofers also doing that too.

The one thing that I have come across, and I have seen it done effectively on occasion, but this is usually with high value buildings, with Important roof coverings or very expensive roof coverings with hard cell foam is dry ice removal. And that can be done. It’s slow. It’s expensive.

But it is relatively precise. And if you if you, Do need to get what you can do is you can save otherwise unsalvageable roofing materials I know that some people have had dry ice removal on hard cell foam simply to get over the hump to sell a house Because actually the roof still might be a bit knackered underneath it But the mortgage company will cope with that whereas they won’t cope with the presence of foam So so I do know that some vendors have gone through that process to sell a house that’s got a slightly dodgy roof, but no foam in place and that kind of, there’s a place for that too.

Matt Nally: And just very briefly what is dry ice removal? Is it a case of like effectively freezing the foam so that it chips off? No,

Steve Hodgson: It’s, but essentially it’s just like grip blasting, but instead of the the the material that’s used to as the aggregate, as the, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Can’t think of it. The stuff that does the stripping that comes out of the machine it’s dry ice crystals rather than rather than grit or carborundum. Yeah, I can’t remember. I can’t think of the word. It’ll come back to me in a second. But yeah, so that’s all it is. So that you’re not left with huge amounts of residues of of the of the stripping component after it’s done.

You are however left with a roof full of tiny little bits of sprayed polyurethane foam which sometimes gets taken out and in certain circumstances I’ve also seen it left in place as well. Now you could argue that it probably doesn’t do very much harm if it’s left in place but bloody hell does it make a mess.

I’ve also seen dry ice stripping where the outside of the roof has changed colour. Because it forces the bits of polyurethane out between the tiles and you can see the one on the street where they’re doing, because it’s got a bright yellow roof for a few days until it rains off, putting all that microplastic crap into the water courses.

But that’s another story, yeah.

Matt Nally: So I’d say that’s another scandal for the future.

Steve Hodgson: Micro, micro polyurethane. Yeah.

Matt Nally: Who knows. Interesting. That’s very fascinating. My final question that I think around this topic is spray foam here to stay in, in its newest format in terms of, obviously you’ve mentioned new builds, have it installed in a much different way, is it, is that going to become more commonplace?

Or is it,

Steve Hodgson: I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that polyurethane foam is here to stay. Polyurethane foam is a technology that may well have had experienced a bump in the road and that’s because in my view that both the manufacturers and the installers that vested very heavily, setting yourself up as a spare polyurethane foam applicator is not a cheap day out.

It’s big kit. It’s big chemistry. It’s a lump of investment. And unfortunately, some of the people that made those investments saw this very easy and very quick and apparently on the face of it, a very profitable low risk route to market. And it’s not turned out that way. But I think it would be an absolute travesty if what is a really interesting, adaptable and an extremely useful technology gets dumped or binned or loses its way just because of an incident in its inception when it first, really started to come into common parlance.

I would not hesitate. And I’ve said this before public and I’ll say it again, I would not hesitate to buy a house where I knew polyurethane foam had been used in the walls or in the roof or in the floor in the correct way appropriately with all the right checks and balances with the right levels of continuity and all the rest of it.

Not a moment’s hesitation. As I say, an incredibly good product where I’ve also seen, and when I was at the Property Care Association, we invited the polyurethane, somebody from a polyurethane foam manufacturer to explore the uses of, as a method of controlling water in the ground because it’s fantastic, as part of a waterproofing solution as have you seen it used to stabilize failing roofs where you’ve got asbestos fibers in a roof.

It can be used to encapsulate those materials and extend a roof that way. It has ground gas protection. I’ve seen it used now and I have a colleague that’s using it quite on a regular basis as part of a solution for ground breath protection in new build. So we really ought not as a construction community to revile this product.

We should embrace it, but, actually trust that the manufacturers that are going to bring this stuff to market have learned their lesson.

Matt Nally: Yeah, definitely. I suppose with all of the noise then around like the article that’s come out this week around mortgage providers not taking on properties about spray foam and so on.

How do you think with that conversation starts to turn is do you think there’s more regulation on the way around? Installation or install? Is it I dunno, is it, are there different conversations going on that you think is gonna shape that differently

Steve Hodgson: personally and maybe, anybody from the polyester remote industry, either installers or manufacturers will cringe at this.

But, I’m allowed to say what I can say now ’cause I don’t have to think about being the CEO of the property care association, but my own view quite honestly, Matt, is that the installation of polyurethane foam in existing ruse as a retrofit measure is a busted flush. I don’t think that’s going to come back.

I hope it doesn’t come back because actually the work that’s necessary to make that is out of proportion and the cost of doing the work and the value that you get from it. Is totally out of proportion with the alternative, which is to install fiberglass across the ceiling.

Now if for example, somebody wants to convert their roof into a room, then polyurethane foam comes back into the fray again, but protected properly by vapor barriers as you build out that room. So if you’re using that space, it’s great, but I honestly think it’s probably a busted flush in respect to trying to apply an insulating product to the periphery of a building where actually you don’t need to do that.

And actually the most effective cost effective and efficient way of doing it Is insulating close to the occupied space at ceiling level and let the roof do what the roof was always supposed to do, which was get wet and dry out, which is get warm and get cold and be ventilated or a bit scabby from time to time, but it sorts itself out.

Leave that alone. So I don’t necessarily think that actually there’s these calls for regulation on that have, there’s no point in it. Because actually the confidence from the consumer has gone in respect to that. And so what we’re bringing in legislation to protect that it’s not there.

And if there needs to be regulation at all, and the observation of existing regulation, it’s about, making sure as we move forward and we adapt our buildings and make them more thermally efficient, that we do that. In a way that is truly sustainable where we’re using materials that don’t have an effect on future generations and actually using techniques that don’t cause those buildings that are ultimately terribly sustainable to be compromised by what we’re doing.

So on, on that whole kind of retrofit and energy performance piece, I don’t think we’ve got an issue as far as using polyurethane foam in other areas. They’ll be subject to the same the same levels of regulation as any other construction material. And that’s, the world of that is currently in flux and is changing rapidly with the Building Safety Act.

So we’re all going to have to get used to more regulation about product specification and how we use them and where they’re safe and where they’re not.

Matt Nally: And also when you’re surveying, identifying where those things eventually have, when you’re saying them have been done correctly and haven’t been, so yeah, it’s a whole new challenge, but it’s been fascinating to, to cover.

Thank you very much for coming on. If, do you run any courses around spray foam and. If people want to know,

Steve Hodgson: Yeah, I, I can and I can deliver training to, to, to small groups. And I can, and I do that. I guess that the regular gig is I do a course for the property care association.

I think there’s one scheduled for February. So if you’re if you are an individual surveyor that wants to do something on P. U. phone when you want a day out we do, I do a day through them. That’s it’s a couple of hundred quid for the day. It’s a nice little relaxed workshop.

Lots of practicals and hands on. I. We all get a feel for it and we get to look at it and we talk about our experiences and it sounds like a bit of a self-help group. It’s slightly more than that but it’s actually a, I think, A-A-A-A-A pretty interesting day out.

So if people are interested, as an individual, certainly, have a look at the PCA website and go towards that. If there are small groups. Then I’m happy to come out and visit people and bring a car full of scabby spray foam and rotten woods. And we can have a day looking at how we evaluate it and how you can go about being slightly more relaxed about making decisions on whether it’s good and it’s bad, because that’s the aim really is to, give people the ability to be able to help consumers and provide them with reliable information rather than just saying, no, can’t deal with it, run away.

There’s a few quid in it as well. Who knows how long that kind of income stream is going to come from polyurethane foam evaluation. It’s not going to last forever but at the moment I can’t meet the demand that I’m facing. I’ll tell you that much.

Matt Nally: Awesome, and you’ve got a real passion for it, so it’s been a pleasure to chat about it.

I don’t know, I don’t

Steve Hodgson: know, it’s

Matt Nally: passion. It comes across like that. It ignites

Steve Hodgson: me, passion’s best left in the bedroom, I think, but yeah, an overused term but but yeah, it is an interesting subject. There’s a lot to learn. And, why shouldn’t it engage one?

Yeah. Thank you.

Matt Nally: Awesome. No, thank you very much for coming on and I look forward to catching up again soon.