Oil residue from closed-cell foam
24c6
| Posted in GBA Pro Help on
We had closed cell foam sprayed in attic. Brown oil residue came through air vent and stained white wood Ashley furniture a pale tan color. Do you know how to clean off the tan oily residue from the foam sprayed in the attic?
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Replies
You should check if there are any other signs of a poor application. There shouldn’t be any gooey residue left over after an application of spray foam. Hopefully you just have a little dribble which sometimes happens at the beginning or end of a run.
You can carefully use a paint scraper to get the worst of the residue off. Some acetone may help with what’s left. Cured spray foam is actually pretty resistant to most solvents, and the ones that do work tend to be VERY nasty. Acetone won’t work very well on fully cured foam, but it does work on the not-yet-cured goo. Acetone is also about the strongest solvent that works and is still relatively safe to use.
Be sure to wear rubber gloves while doing this work. Ideally you want butyl rubber gloves (like 3M North gloves), since those are resistant to acetone. Most gloves are NOT resistant to acetone.
Bill
I recommend that you contact the installer first thing. Spray foam installation is product manufacturing at the job site; it's complicated. Before you call them, take a look at this article and see how many of the tips you think your installer followed.
https://www.buildinggreen.com/blog/foam-place-insulation-7-tips-getting-injection-and-spray-foam-right
Then you might have a sense of how likely or unlikely it is that you got a quality installation. And how much you might be able to count on them knowing the problem and the remedy.
Take great care with acetone as a solvent: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tfacts21.pdf.
Peter