The Less Known Benefits Of Pipe Insulation

You may have heard that insulating pipes in your home can help you why preventing them from freezing. This is true: By insulating the pipes in your home, it will keep the water that is coursing through the system from freezing and then expanding until it eventually bursts and causes significant and expensive damage to your home. There are other less dramatic benefits that insulating pipes can offer for your home as well. Not only do these help homeowners pockets by slashing some of those utility bills, but they also aid in the general comfort of day to day living.

Of the less known benefits that insulating plumbing piping in your home offers, it’s performance in minimizing the loss and gain of heat is of the most noteworthy. When water passes through the plumbing lines through a home and it isn’t insulated, the hot water will generally lose heat and cold water will gain it. By insulating the pipes, you effectively reduce this inefficiency that will inevitably happen. With the hot-water pipe, though it may seem as though its a minor saving to spend all that money to insulate, but the truth is that the long term savings are truly significant: your monthly heating bills will be reduced, and you will not have to wait as long for heated water to get to the faucets in your homes washrooms and kitchen.

Whenever you have a cooler surface than the air that surrounds it,  such as the plumbing pipes, by insulating the pipes you essentially control the condensation that would inevitably corrode the fittings and pipes if left unchecked, and ultimately this would lead to severe failure. Even though it may not sound like a serious concern, it isn’t uncommon at all, especially when the pipes have cold water going through them and they come into contact with humid hot air. Another not so considered benefit to insulating the pipes in a home is that it not only helps the pipes, but it also protects people from coming into contact with hot or cold pipping.

There are a few choices you can go with for pipe insulation, with varying degrees of insulating capabilities and each made with different materials. Some have integrated vapour barrier control, while others are better suited for hot-water applications. These include:

this is installed by experts generally and is by far the best choice for pipe insulation, as it doubles as a vapour barrier, and can get into all the hard to reach spaces where other forms of insulation can’t reach.

this is easy to fit over existing pipes. When in place, it is a good idea to seal it off with tape to further enhance the insulating properties.

this material has an adhesive this runs along its slit.

Older homes still have asbestos in the insulation that surrounds the pipes, not all, but a lot. Especially if it is agitated and the fine particles become airborne, this asbestos ridden insulation can present some dangerous health hazard. Asbestos pipe insulation can be difficult to recognize, and it’s recommended to bring in a specialist to inspect for it.

We tend to recommend going with spray foam insulation for your pipes as there are many benefits compared to other insulating materials for this job. Open cell spray foam is a good option for insulating pipes indoors, it is less expensive than closed cell spray foam because it doesn’t offer the same R-value or any moisture controlling properties.

Closed cell spray foam is stronger and denser than open cell, and can be used for outdoor applications as well as it offers the moisture control and high R-value. Spray foam can get to hard to reach places and has no problem with awkward shaped spaces. This coupled with it’s amazing sealing and insulating properties makes it the superior choice to insulate pipes with.

Check out the areas below covered by Spray Foam Kings offering pipe insulation services in the GTA.