Insulation in Staten Island, NY

Insulating homes and buildings in Staten Island

Staten Island is closer to our Hillside shop than much of New Jersey is, which surprises people. Ten miles and a bridge, and we are on site. The borough's mix of detached and semi-detached single-family homes, many built between the 1960s and 1990s, gives us a consistent and very fixable set of problems.

Crawl spaces are the headline issue here. A large share of Staten Island homes sit over vented crawl spaces, and in this climate — humid, coastal, and warm for much of the year — venting a crawl space actively pulls moist air in against cool surfaces where it condenses. That is the source of the musty smell homeowners describe upstairs. Encapsulating the crawl space with closed cell foam on the walls and a sealed vapor barrier over the soil is the correct fix, not more vents.

Proximity to the water also means humidity loads are higher than a few miles inland, which affects product choice. In these assemblies we lean toward closed cell foam wherever moisture is in play, because it rejects water rather than storing it.