Batt insulation installation in Vancouver, boarded by the same crew

It comes from your permit drawings, and the reason we point you there rather than quoting a figure is that Vancouver is its own jurisdiction. The City of Vancouver runs the Vancouver Building By-law, not the provincial BC Building Code, and its energy requirements are stricter. Most homeowners assume the provincial numbers apply here, and so do a fair number of contractors, which is how you end up with a wall built to the wrong value.

So the honest answer is that we do not guess the value and we do not read it off a national or provincial table. On permitted work the required value is specified on the drawings your designer or builder submitted, and it has already been reviewed by the City. We install to that specified value, and we check what we are installing against the drawings before the inspector arrives rather than after.

If you have no drawings yet and you want a number for budgeting, ask whoever is preparing your permit application, or ask the City directly. We will tell you what the drawings say. We will not tell you what we think the by-law says.

No. We install batts, which means fibreglass and mineral wool, plus the vapour barrier that goes with them. No spray foam, no blown-in or loose-fill cellulose, no rigid foam board as a job on its own.

Those are different trades with different equipment and, in the case of two-component spray foam, different ventilation and re-occupancy rules. Search for a spray foam contractor or an insulation contractor with blowing equipment and you will find several in Vancouver who do nothing else. That is who you want for those, not us.

We would rather say this on the page than have you book a site visit and find out. If part of your job is foam and part of it is batts behind new drywall, we are happy to take the batt and board portion and work around whoever is doing the foam.

Mineral wool is denser and stiffer, so it holds its shape in the cavity instead of sagging over time. It does not burn, it absorbs noticeably more low-frequency sound, and it shrugs off water rather than soaking it up and collapsing. It also costs meaningfully more per square foot, and it is heavier and slower to cut and fit, so the labour side is a little higher too.

Fibreglass is cheaper and lighter and it works fine in a dry interior wall cavity. That is most of a house.

Where we would spend the extra: a bathroom or laundry wall, a home theatre or drum room, a shared wall between two dwellings, and a mechanical room. Where we would not: standard bedroom and hallway partitions in a dry finished basement. If someone has quoted you mineral wool wall to wall through a whole basement, ask what specifically it is buying you in the rooms where nothing is wet and nothing is loud. Often the answer is nothing, and the money is better spent on the vapour barrier detailing.

Yes, for airborne sound, and no, for anything else. Batts in a partition do nothing structural and they will not stop footsteps overhead. What they do reduce is voices, television and music carrying between rooms, and the difference is easy to hear.

The catch is that sound follows air. An insulated wall with an unsealed gap around a door, an open electrical box or a duct running straight through it will disappoint you. If noise is the reason you are insulating, the sealing matters as much as the batt, and mineral wool is worth the upgrade here because it does more at the low end where voices and bass sit.

Between separate dwelling units the code sets a minimum sound rating for walls and floors, and those ratings belong to a tested assembly rather than to any one product in it. Where a rated assembly is required, we build the assembly as specified rather than swapping a component for something similar, because a substitution voids the test result the rating depends on.

If the work involves framing, insulation, vapour barrier or drywall, yes, a City of Vancouver building permit is needed. Paint, flooring and trim on their own do not need one.

Insulation sits firmly on the permit side of that line, which surprises people because it feels like a materials purchase rather than construction. The reason is inspection. Once the walls are closed up nobody can verify what went in behind them, so the City wants to look while it is still open.

Practically, this affects your schedule more than your budget. If you are not sure which side of the line your job is on, the City's Development and Building Services Centre will tell you, and we will give you our read before we quote.

On permitted work, after the insulation and vapour barrier inspection is approved. Not before. This is the single most common reason a drywall date moves in Vancouver and it is worth planning around rather than arguing with.

The sequence is fixed. Framing gets inspected first, before any insulation goes in and after the sheathing membrane and all the plumbing, gas, electrical and mechanical rough-ins are complete. Once framing passes, the insulation and vapour barrier go in completely, and then the second inspection happens. The City's guidance is that interior wall and ceiling finishes should not start until that one is approved.

The inspector is looking at vapour barrier continuity, poly boots on electrical boxes, sealed duct joints and insulation on sprinkler pipe. Every one of those is invisible behind board. Boarding early to save three days can mean taking the walls back off, so we do not do it, and we will tell you a date that accounts for the hold point rather than one that ignores it.

On the warm side of the insulation, which in Vancouver means the interior face, under the drywall. 6 mil polyethylene, seams lapped and sealed, poly boxes or sealed boots on electrical outlets, and every penetration closed with acoustical sealant.

The reason it matters here has nothing to do with cold. Vancouver is wet and mild, and the risk is warm humid indoor air reaching a cold surface inside the wall and condensing there. Water that condenses inside a cavity has nowhere to go and nothing to dry it. A puncture or an unsealed lap does not leak a little bit everywhere, it concentrates moisture at one spot, which is why continuity is the whole point of the layer.

This is also the slow failure mode. A batt job with sloppy poly looks identical to a good one the day the board goes on, and the difference shows up as a stain or a soft patch several years later. It is the part of this trade where cutting an hour costs the most.

Not with batts. Batts have to be fitted into an open cavity by hand, so the board has to come off. There is no version of this where we drill holes and push batts through them.

The method that does work through small holes is dense-pack or blown-in, and we do not offer it. If keeping your finished walls intact is the priority, call an insulation contractor with blowing equipment and ask about drill and fill. Be aware you are also not getting a vapour barrier that way, since the poly needs an open cavity too.

Where removing board does make sense is when you were going to open the wall anyway. A gut renovation, a window being moved, a wall being re-wired or re-plumbed, water damage that has to come out regardless. Taking down sound drywall purely to add batts to one wall is usually not worth what it costs, and we will say so rather than quoting it.

Provincial and municipal efficiency rebate programs do exist, and we are not the people to ask about them. We do not administer rebates, we do not apply on your behalf, and we will not tell you your job qualifies.

The reason for being that blunt is that these programs change from year to year and they usually have conditions that catch people out. Many require specific measures, a pre-approval step before work starts, an energy assessment, or a contractor registered with the program. Doing the work first and applying afterwards is how eligibility gets lost. Check the current rules with the program directly before you assume anything, and do it before you book us rather than after.

What we do give you is documentation. Our invoice itemises what was actually installed and where, so if you do apply you have a paper record of the material and the scope rather than a one-line total.

No. Attic top-ups and crawlspace encapsulation are both outside what we do, and both are usually done with equipment and methods we do not carry.

An attic top-up is normally blown-in material over what is already there, which is a specialist job and a fast one for the people set up to do it. Crawlspace encapsulation is really a moisture management job that happens to involve insulation, and in Vancouver crawlspaces the moisture side is the part that decides whether it works.

Our insulation work is in walls, ceilings and floors that are about to be covered in drywall by us. If your project is a finished basement with a crawlspace attached to it, we will handle the walls and ceilings and you will want somebody else for the crawl.

We quote a fixed price for the job rather than an hourly rate, and we are not going to publish a per square foot figure for this one because we do not have Vancouver batt pricing we would stand behind. Anyone quoting you a confident national average is quoting a different city.

What we can tell you is what moves the number. Surface area rather than floor area, and surface area runs roughly 2.5 to 3.5 times floor area once every wall and ceiling is counted. Cavity depth, because a deeper cavity takes more material. Mineral wool versus fibreglass, which is a real gap per square foot. How much existing wiring, plumbing and ductwork has to be worked around, since every service in a cavity means cutting and splitting instead of dropping a batt in. Whether the poly and the board are in the same scope. And access, meaning stairs, parking and how far material has to be carried.

The cheapest way to buy this work is bundled. If the insulation, vapour barrier and drywall are one scope with one crew, you are paying one mobilisation and one set of trips instead of two or three, and nobody is standing in the room deciding whose fault the failed inspection was.

Yes, and that is the way we prefer to work. Drywall is the main business and insulation is the layer underneath it, so on most jobs we are doing the batts, the poly and the board as one continuous scope.

The practical reason to buy it that way is accountability. When one company insulates and another boards, the inspection sits on the boundary between them. If the vapour barrier fails the inspection, the insulator says the boarder disturbed it and the boarder says it was never sealed properly. With one crew there is no argument available, and the person who sealed the poly is the person who has to answer for it.

We will still take insulation on its own if your drywall is already arranged, and we will still take drywall on its own over somebody else's insulation, though in that case we will look at the poly before we cover it and tell you if we think it will not pass.