Bugbee Insulation

Bugbee was easy to deal with on the phone and showed up promptly when scheduled. The installation took about a day and a half; the crew were professional and courteous, although they did say that "the boss" would be along later, and this person never showed up. The quality of the job was extremely spotty. The crawl-space job appears to be really excellent, with no voids or gaps and complete coverage to the specified thickness. The living-room application was quite spotty, particularly along the edges of the room where the space below the roof was continuous with the soffits and so connected to the outside. When they were done, there were several clearly visible holes leading directly between the inside and the outside, clearly unacceptable in a cold climate. There were also areas plainly thinner than specified. The work on the box-ends appeared to be good, but we could only see the inside ends. We called their office, and they promptly sent out an employee who had not been part of the original crew, who agreed that repairs needed to be done. The original crew showed up to repair the areas they had left out, and in general they did a reasonable job (at no additional expense), though we did find one remaining cold-air entry point, which we plugged ourselves with caulk. Cleanup was was adequate but not exemplary: we found a fairly large roll of plastic sheeting covered with foam bits that they had left behind, and there were tiny bits of foam *everywhere*. When I went over the area carefully to prepare it for sheetrocking, I found that several areas sagged well below where the sheetrock would come especially along the margins of the ceiling-to-be, requiring me to do quite a bit of extra trimming. I recently had occasion to remove the outside covering of a series of five of the box-ends (to access some plumbing) and was quite disappointed at the application of foam on the bottom surface. There should have been about 2" of foam completely covering this surface, but there was far, far less, and in many places there was none at all. There were hugely thick plugs of foam between the interior of the basement and the interior of the box-ends and between 1" and 2" of foam on the outside ends of the box-ends, but little to no foam between the bottom of the box-ends and the overlying fiberglass insulation. This is not what we asked for. Finally, I was unaware that we might be entitled to a rebate from Efficiency Vermont on the insulation if we had used a contractor approved by the firm who had done our original energy audit (Building Energy). Although it was certainly my responsibility to verify that Bugbee qualified, it would have been very nice if they had told me that I would *not* qualify if I used their company.

I liked the way they did the work, and we were very satisfied. They were neat, and they didn't take long at all.