Insulation Contractors Turn Air Sealing Into Competitive Advantage
“We started as an insulation company but AeroBarrier has given us better conversations with builders by helping them reach beneficial utility rebate programs and lower blower door numbers where money is a key driver.”
– Mike Lyon, Midwest AeroBarrier
As IECC requirments continue their path towards tighter and tighter homes, builders are seeking new methods to achieving these requirements. While many trades are involved in ensuring proper air tightness, air sealing is a task that mainly falls on the insulation contractor. This can create a conflict of interest for many reasons.
Insulation Jobs are low margin. Volume is King.
Insulation awards are usually won over pennies as each contractor will go into a price war with one another to get work. This significantly lowers profit margins and emphasizes the need for volume. A key aspect in any contractor’s ability to increase volume is their efficiency and ability to quickly finish a job and move on to the next project. With codes getting tighter, insulation contractors find themselves spending more time on the job with closer attention to detail for their air sealing responsibility, greatly diminishing their ability to reach a higher volume of projects.
Remove costly and unnecessary trips
All too often we hear the struggles of insulation contractors needing to make multiple trips. Best case scenario there just is not enough time in the day to both insulate and air seal the building which leads to additional trips to complete a job. Worst case, the builder failed their inspection and is calling the insulation contractor to resolve the issue. In both scenarios, the insulation contractor is making extra trips which cuts deeper into those low margins and ability to scale their business. Added fuel expenses, added labor costs, and pulling contractors away from other revenue generating jobs is an unnecessary headache that is easily overcome with AeroBarrier.
“Serving an already energy efficient state, AeroBarrier was our opportunity to differentiate from other insulation contractors by offering a solution that guarantees compliance for our builders and provides them with peace of mind” – Yudah Schwartz, Superseal Insulation
Air Sealing Needs to be a Primary Responsibility, NOT Secondary
Essentially, insulation contractors now have two distinct jobs — Insulate and air seal the building. This removes the ability to focus on the core of their business to quickly tackle projects successfully. Builders should understand the importance air sealing has on any project. Failing a blower door test at final inspection due to not meeting the air tightness requirement is costly for all parties involved and is a leading cause for delay in completion. Placing that additional responsibility on any one trade is a heavy burden. With the significant impact air sealing has, why wouldn’t it be a stand-alone service?
AeroBarrier allows just that. Insulation contractors can quickly divide and conquer a project with consistency they did not have prior. The flexibility of AeroBarrier allows insulation contractors to easily implement the solution into their offering with minimal learning curve or disruption to their daily operations. Simply select from many methods to fit best with your existing business process and become more efficient:
- Air seal first and then just insulate right over
- Insulate first and then air seal right after
- Part of your crew could prep the area for AeroBarrier while the other part is insulating uninterrupted.
All in all, AeroBarrier allows contractors to focus on one task at a time, providing better and more efficient results, turning an unpredictable, manual task into a consistent, dependable process. This leads to faster project completion and reduced rework to easily take on a larger volume of projects and scale your business.
“We have found that multi-family is an ideal environment for AeroBarrier where scheduling is typically very compressed with a lot of overlap among skilled trades.” – Melissa Geska, US Ceiling Corp
Click here to learn how AeroBarrier can impact your project.