Who sells Kingspan Kooltherm in the US?
Hi all – I’m blown away by Kingspan’s Kooltherm phenolic rigid insulation boards. GBA profiled them here: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/kingspan-kooltherm-phenolic-foam-rigid-insulation
They get a stable R-8 per inch, and they don’t seem to burn. Game changer if they don’t cost a fortune. We want to spec these for the roof (not ceiling) if the compressive strength is adequate, and maybe walls.
Problem: I can’t find them for sale anywhere in the US. All I get are British and Australian stores. I even tried Bing and DuckDuckGo…
Does anyone know what’s going on with this product? Did Kingspan pull it from the US? Who sells it? I wonder if this is the kind of thing that you have to source through wholesalers…
Thanks for your help.
p.s. Product page for the wall panels: https://www.kingspan.com/us/en-us/product-groups/insulation/insulation-boards/kooltherm-k12-framing-board
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Replies
I second this question. I tried contacting them via email or their website (don't remember which--that was over a year ago) and never got a reply.
This is standard operating procedure for most companies, for some reason. It makes no sense (why even put the contact form there in the first place?), but I've seen this time and again.
Did you try contacting the US arm of Kingspan? I suspect they are only selling to big contractors, but you don't know until you ask.
Negative, I haven't reached out to them. I looked on their website for a "Where to Buy" sort of feature and didn't find it.
Just emailed them – hopefully they'll respond.
Phone calls often work better than emails since is harder to ignore or “forget to reply” to a phone call. I’ve run into this before too.
Bill
UPDATE: I emailed them nine days ago and they never responded. What a strange company. I guess Kingspan products are out of the picture for now.
I find this very common with manufacturers of all kinds of building supplies. They aren't set up to sell directly to end consumers, they sell through distributors and local resellers.
I emailed their Info address, which they display front and center on their website, so they really should reply. My email asked where I could buy their product, i.e. who are their distributors, etc. I gave them my region.
Check your SPAM folder?
Try calling them?
Nothing in spam. I'm not going to call them – I emailed them and that should be enough.
As I said before, not replying to unsolicited e-mails is unfortunately common, almost standard practice for most companies it seems. You have to call them if you want a definitive answer, but based on the evidence so far I agree that the chances are slim that you're going to get a positive response.
Case in point: I was trying to order some medical supplies from a pharmacy in Australia a few weeks ago. I got to the payment screen and there was nowhere to enter my credit card info even though it was instructing me to do so. Given the time difference, e-mailing seemed like the most logical solution. No reply. I was literally trying to given them $1000, and they couldn't be bothered to reply. Flash forward to today, I went and tried their website again and now the payment is working. So either they read my e-mail and fixed the issue but didn't feel it necessary to tell me, or they didn't even read my e-mail and it's just a coincidence that the bug got fixed. Either way, it defies any logical explanation for a business to operate that way. I've experienced similar things in the past with companies and their e-mail practices.
Interesting. I don't see my e-mail as "unsolicited", since they put their contact info front and center on their website. I didn't even have to click on a Contact page. They're inviting people to email them. See here: https://imgur.com/a/8vaxnrr
Thermal Foams Inc out of Syracuse and Buffalo NY have it available, (315) 699-8734. I have used it on 2 projects now. I want to say around $55 a sheet for the 2" K12 Framing board but we combined the 2 projects together when we bought the foam.