I have a warehouse to clean this week and the exterior walls are covered with spray foam. It’s old and been there for a long time, some of the areas were hit with forklifts but it’s mostly in tact. I plan to softwash these just like a stucco finish but wanted to see if there is any risk in doing so? I have never applied sh to this material. I will do a test first but does anyone know if you can’t wash this with a 1-2% mix? Edit: can I safely go between 2-4% on this? It’s pretty dirty and I think a hotter mix should be used if it’s ok so use SH on it?
Damn son she’s looking gloomy out there!. Test a small area, quite a unique building method, you don’t want to melt it down to the skeleton lol
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Oh yea I surveyed the week the wildfire smoke was real bad. I’ve never seen spray foam as an exterior wall material before. It covers a steel building, easy way to insulate I guess.
Yeah quite common to have the inner walls done for insulation purposes. Looks to be very porous.
I wonder if warm water and 1000-1500 psi would work and be safe to not damage the outer skin. I will definitely have to do some tests. I doubt many people have come
across this, I’ve been working on commercial buildings for 17 years and never saw an exterior wall made of spray foam before. It’s either the same as the interior stuff or maybe rated for exterior, if there is such a thing.
Anyone clean indoor spray foam before?
I’ve never seen it either. It’s definitely not insulation spray foam that’s used on the inner walls, that stuff you can scrape out with your hand, it basically regular foam sprayed instead of laid from cut up sheets to get into every gap for more efficient insulation. That building is probably just a really crappy stucco job. Have you seen the building in person? What makes you think it’s foam?
Almost looks like some kind of continuous insulation system? I have never seen a building with quite that exterior finish tho
I’m no foam expert, but there are different kinds of spray foam, closed cell types that have a “skin” on them that makes them a little tougher. I’d be worried about using pressure, it is still just a foam. did you call your local spray foam insulation person? They could probably tell you all about it.
Looks so dark there, a little darker and I would say you were in Gotham…this looks like a neat gig. I can’t wait to see what you do.
Thanks man, yeah it was apocalyptic that week. Woke up one morning and the sky was straight orange. I am definitely looking forward to see how it turns out and then post the after pics. I’m going to try 4 different strengths on a test area. 1%,2%,3% and 4%. My guess is 2-3% should do it but the hotter I can go the less I’ll have to blast it with any pressure (even 500psi with the m5.
I went in person. I saw the areas the fork lift hit and it’s yellow foam behind the outer skin for sure. I know it’s a pain to get the foam off your hands when it dries (I’ve used it many times over the years, like big gap filler and such) and it’s really stays put. Never applied a chem to it like SH though. Looks like I may be the first one to do it!
