How a hole in the Guggenheim revealed a hole in the insulation market

It started, improb­ably, at the Guggenheim Museum. 

Doug Lamm had been working for decades as a consul­tant for compa­nies that produce building mate­rials, and a client was tasked with insu­lating the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed modern art museum. The job required carving gaping holes into the curved walls of the famed inverted ziggurat struc­ture on the Upper East Side. 

The museum’s walls were drilled, the insu­la­tion installed, and ulti­mately spackled shut again. But Lamm real­ized he had discov­ered a hole in the market. 

Cold-climate build­ings here in the Northeast strug­gled with aging fiber­glass insu­la­tion that simply didn’t cover every inch of a wall’s internal cavity, leaving rooms drafty. In 2014, with a small grant from an economic devel­op­ment agency in his home state of Massachusetts, Lamm launched a startup focused on devel­oping a new way to insert highly insu­lating foam into under-insu­lated walls. Instead of fiber­glass or aerosol spray foam, Lamm devel­oped a closed-cell polyurethane foam that can be injected directly into walls through a small hole.

The tech­nology drew more support from the U.S. Department of Energy, indus­trial giant Saint Gobain, and the utility Eversource, which saw the foam injec­tions as a way to increase the energy effi­ciency of homes. Based in the scenic Boston-area suburb of Amesbury, Massachusetts, Lamm’s company Building Envelope Materials has in the last decade injected more than 40,000 cavi­ties in build­ings along the Eastern Seaboard.

By better main­taining indoor temper­a­tures passively, the mate­rial, the company says, reduces thermal energy use and asso­ci­ated carbon emis­sions by 20 to 30 percent. Filling gaps in insu­la­tion is fairly non-inva­sive. The startup says it can insu­late up to a dozen apart­ments per day with occu­pants still inside. A typical 1‑bedroom can be done in fewer than three hours. 

Now Building Envelope Materials is preparing for a big push into New York City as building owners race to comply with Local Law 97 (LL97), but are often unable to do gut retro­fits of their old, pre-war buildings. 

“We started with houses and quickly real­ized what we had was a unique way to do big build­ings,” Lamm told Skylight. ​“If you want to do big build­ings, you have got to be in New York City. That’s where they are.”

The company arrived in the city this spring, insu­lating a pre-war, five-story brick apart­ment building in The Bronx. Another project else­where in the five boroughs is set to begin next month. They’ve joined the latest cohort of The Clean Fight, a climate solu­tions accel­er­ator, and a prelim­i­nary deal with the New York City Housing Authority is underway.

Lamm’s team devel­oped a propri­etary closed-cell foam, and uses a special needle to inject the foam into a wall through a quarter-inch-sized hole that can be easily spackled over imme­di­ately afterward. 

This tech­nology largely addresses the prob­lems other foam faces. Spray foam, for example, sticks to the wall and expands rapidly in place, meaning that those applying the mate­rial need access to the full space. The aerosol also comes with partic­u­lates that require the space to be cleared for at least a day to avoid breathing in toxic stuff. By contrast, injected foam, like what Building Envelope Materials uses, drips down, and can thus be used to fill a space if calcu­lated correctly. The cheaper foam on the market is what’s known as open cell, meaning the polyurethane-based mate­rial ulti­mately becomes sponge-like. Closed-cell foam is denser and conserves twice as much energy, but it’s more expensive. 

To install the foam in build­ings, the firm created a novel system for deliv­ering the mate­rial without a huge truck with a massive hose, making appli­ca­tions in apart­ment build­ings easier. And they’ve devel­oped an in-house app that allows its specially-trained contrac­tors to measure and plot out the exact amount of foam to add to the wall to fill the cavity without over­filling and acci­den­tally damaging the structure. 

Foam isn’t always a miracle fix. ​“One of the bigger risks with it is if you over­fill a cavity, it can pop the drywall right off the studs,” said Nate Adams, an HVAC installer and consul­tant with exper­tise in home decar­boniza­tion. ​“You have to be cautious with it.” 

Still, he said, ​“getting more insu­la­tion into a cavity that already has fiber­glass in it is fairly diffi­cult, so this is an inter­esting solution.” 

The next big chal­lenge for the company, Lamm said, is securing funding support from Con Edison, New York City’s elec­trical utility, to offer incen­tives for building owners — espe­cially those in afford­able housing — to install Building Envelope Materials’ insu­la­tion. In Boston, owners of below-market-rate housing receive the company’s services for $0, since the city’s main utility, Eversource Energy, pays for the work as part of its effi­ciency program. Market rate units typi­cally receive about 75 percent of the costs back in rebates from the utility. (Lamm declined to share exact cost numbers for the work.)

“That percentage is going to make or break this busi­ness in New York, because afford­able housing agen­cies don’t have a lot of money floating around to do this work,” Lamm said. ​“If it’s not close to 100 percent, it’s going to be awfully hard to do afford­able housing.” 

For now, ​“if this is going to fly in New York,” he said, ​“the incen­tive piece is going to be a really crit­ical part of it.” The next step for the company, he said, is meeting with ConEd.