Spray Foam Insulation in Charlotte, TN

The town was established in 1804 by an act of the state legislature to serve as the county seat for the newly created Dickson County, and it was incorporated in 1837. For much of the nineteenth century it thrived as a stage coach hub. Then the railroad arrived and the industry moved to Dickson, several miles to the southwest, and Charlotte stayed roughly the size it was. The population today is about 1,656.

A town that stopped growing early kept its old buildings. A large share of the housing around the town core was built well before central heating was normal, and those houses sit on stone piers or shallow block foundations with a timber floor over open ground. The insulation under those floors, where it exists at all, is usually fibreglass that was pushed between the joists decades ago. Half of it is on the ground by the time we see it, because nothing was holding it up but friction and habit.

The water situation adds to that. Town Branch, a small stream in the Cumberland River watershed, runs through Charlotte from west to east. Houses on the low ground along the branch sit over soil that stays damp well into the year. Damp air under a timber floor becomes cold floors in January and a musty smell in August, and piling more batts into the space does not fix it, because the problem is the open path between the ground and the room above.

Outside the town limits the character changes. The surrounding land is farms and small acreages, and the buildings there are a different job: older farmhouses added onto over generations, plus metal barns and workshops. An addition almost never shares a foundation with the original house, and the seam where old meets new is usually an open airway.

Open-cell is the softer, lighter product. It expands further for the same pull of the trigger and it deadens sound well. In the attic of one of Charlotte's older houses, or inside partition walls, open-cell does the job as long as vapour control is not what is being asked of it.

The two products are not rivals. Most houses here need closed-cell below and open-cell above, and we will point out where the cheaper material is actually the right one.

• Crawl spaces on pier or block foundations. Most of the town core rests on them, and the rim joist on these houses has often never been touched.
• Floors over the low ground by Town Branch. Sealing under the floor cuts the winter cold and the summer smell at the same source.
• Attics in pre-war houses. Air sealing the attic plane does more than another layer of loose fill dumped on top of the old one.
• The seam on added-onto farmhouses. Where a newer wing meets the original structure there is usually a gap you can feel with your hand.
• Metal barns and workshops on the surrounding acreages. Bare steel sweats when humid air hits it. Closed-cell stops the condensation at the surface.

Older framing raises the stakes. A pass sprayed too thick against an old joist can pull away from the wood as it cools. Foam sprayed off-ratio never cures properly and stays soft inside the cavity. Neither fault can be patched. The failed material gets cut out, and removal is slower and dirtier than the original spray ever was. That is the entire case for using a crew that does this every working day.

You can also see our main spray foam insulation page and the full service area.