I am in the process of pricing out spray foam insulation for my icf house. I did some searching into this and found that there are numerous lawsuits against Demilec. It seems the lawsuits allege odor issues and health issues related to the product. Does anyone have any personal experience or see much concern with this product?

Most open cell foam have some lingering odor for months, but not necessarily health issues. Most of the time when problems arise it gets traced to installer error- incorrect temperature or mixing of the 2 chemicals, etc. Some problems attributed to open cell foam have more to do with climate & assembly stackup leading to inadequate moisture handling.

If you google the name of any foam vendor along with "lawsuit" you'll find whole websites full of unhappy campers with botched installations. A more important thing for YOU to research is how many unhappy (or suit-happy) customers YOUR installer has. There are few rocket scientists wasting their careers as foam installers, but there's both an art & engineering/science aspects to getting it right. Seeking a contractor with longevity in the biz and a good track record is worth spending some time on. It's a PITA to remove once it's in. (With closed-cell it's an even bigger PITA.)

If you're still concerned, you can design it out of the assembly and use a different approach to air-sealing.

I have the Demilec soy based 2#CC foam in my cathedral ceiling (enclosed) and in my band joist (open) and have had no odor or health issues. The smell was gone in a day or two in a summer installation where we kept windows open for ventilation.

-Rosalinda

2lb foam outgasses for a very long time but at a very low rate, so it's less obvious (especially once you close it in.)

Open cell is a bit more pungent, but abates rapidly over the first few days & weeks even when it's not closed-in, but in an enclosed space (say in a small crawlspace) it would still be detectible months later. In a wall cavity behind latex painted gypsum, it's not noticable over the smell of latex paint even when fairly freshly installed.

Dana,
I'm sure you are right about the installer and the attention needed to do the job correctly. Does open cell or spray foam for that matter loose R value after time? I was told by one installer that it does and they rate their foam at 3.5 after 90 days while another says that they are 4.1 at installation time. It appears that there is not set standard when comparing different manufactures.

Who cares what the R value is for the first 90 days (or the first 5 years, for that matter)? Most HFC-blown goods have their highest R value the day they're installed, but the published R-values are the aged fully-outgassed value. With closed cell foam that takes years, but still, who cares?

With open-cell foam the outgassing is pretty quick (90 days feels right) and many/most oc foams are water-blown, and being somewhat vapor permeable (4-10 perms) will have an R-value that drifts a bit with the seasonal average humidity & temp after the initial curing, but it's not by very much. With 5.5" of o.c. foam in a 2 x 6 framed wall with a 25% framing fraction the difference in whole-wall R between a cavity-fill of R4.1/inch foam and R3.5/inch foam is less than R1 after factoring in the framing.

So again, who cares? Does R12.9 really underperform R13.7 in a meaningful way, when they're both air-tight?

Demilec's half pound foam is rated R3.8/inch at some humidity & temp, Icynene's is rated R3.7/inch at some humidity & temp (maybe the same, maybe different- I haven't bothered to look) brand X might be R3.5 or even a crummy R3.2, but it still doesn't add up to much in terms of real performance difference- all half-pound foam delivers a pretty good air seal and fairly high vapor permeance.

Cavity fill is cavity fill- putting the budget difference between competing o.c. foam cavity-fill quotes into higher-R foam sheathing (that adds R to the framing as well as center cavity) is always better bang/buck. To paraphrase a certain Bill:

"It's the thermal bridging, stupid!"

A friend of mine is a Demelec sprayer for 10+ years and he is a very conscientious guy. He recommends it highly but he uses BASF for some things as well so I should ask him what the difference is. I also know that they formulate the US product different from the Canadian product but again, I don't know why.

Dana, Thanks for the info. I am in the process of building an ICF house in the NY area. I am going to spray foam the gable walls and roof. The architect specified spraying 14 inches of foam over the 2x12 rafters and 8 inches over the 2x4 gables. If I were to uses open cell icynene do I need some form of vapor barrier? Is 14 inches and 8 inches overkill? What would you suggest?

"NY area" means a lot of different things- a ZIP code or climate zone would be more useful, given the widely varying climates across NY state.

14" of generic R3.5/inch open cell foam is about R49, which is code-min in parts of climate zone 6, and you would still need to hit that number to eliminate ice-damming in snowier parts of climate zone 5. At 14" half-pound Demilec is under 2, perms interpolating from their spec sheets (if those are to be believed), which might be OK applied to the roof deck without an interior vapor retarder in zone 5 or lower. Half pound Icynene would be over 3 perms and probably not, but it might take decades to find out- it's almost certainly good enough for NYC/L.I. but probably not for colder parts of NY. On the gable ends 8" is R30-ish, and as long as the siding on the gable has a rainscreen gap you can get away without an interior vapor retarder in zones 4 & 5, but not zone 6. BTW: Vapor barrier latex applied directly on o.c. foam has proven inadequate in field testing.

While those R-values are definitely not overkill for upstate NY, it might be for NYC or Long Island (but not by much), depending on how you're heating the place and what your financial/other model is.

For the roof deck look into going with 3-5"+ of water-blown 2-lb Icynene the MD-R-200 product (and not MD-C-200, which is blown with HFC254fa) and finishing out the R to whatever you like with cheaper open cell goods. The water blown 2lb foam runs ~R16/1.3 perms @ 3". In zones 5 & 6 go with 5" to get it under 1-perm, but in zone 4 you can go with just 3".

Dana, Thanks. BTW I am in zone 5 12561.

I had Demilec polyurethane closed cell foam sprayed all over my basement walls up until the perimeter joist. 2 1/2 inches thick. Recovered it with gypsum boards framed with 2x4 wood trusts that were built AFTER the polyurethane was sprayed. No issue at all with the smell. I I like the product and the guy that sprayed it has decades of experience. Cheers!

I live in a 250-year old farm house in Massachusetts. The house was not insulated to a modern standard, and the wall studs were on the flat, meaning the wall cavities were too shallow for insulation to flow properly. I could not find an insulation contractor who knew how to handle it, though of course they all have a story for you. After a lot of research and another cold winter, I found a spray-foam guy who uses Demilec. He knew his stuff, though he wasn't sure about the wall cavities. He recommended that we spray-foam the roof, so that's what I had him do. He said that the early spray foams were bad due to persistent out-gassing. Modern foams do this too, but Demilec does all the out-gassing it's going to do on the day it is sprayed. After that, it's inert and never does it again. This turned out to be true. There is no odor whatsoever, even in the attic. You hold up your hand next to the foam and you can feel the heat from your hand reflecting back. It's a great product, and it has made the heating of my house so much easier and cheaper. It has been so effective that I don't worry about insulating the walls any longer. I think the lawsuits are probably frivolous or lawyer-induced, or both. The Demilec was sprayed in six years ago and there have been no problems whatsoever.