About Eco Foam Solutions
He has been putting foam under slabs since he was fourteen
Eco Foam Solutions is a Duluth supplier run by people who have poured the concrete. That is the whole difference. We are not a distributor who picked up a product line, and we can tell you where this material does not belong as readily as where it does.
Where it started
Fourteen years old, on his father's crew
Ryan Bruckelmyer started working for his dad at fourteen. The job was levelling off slabs and laying foam underneath them, which means he has been handling this exact material for most of his working life.
He has built houses of his own since. The habit that stuck from those first summers was simpler than any of it.
When you are at that age, you have to be a hard worker to keep a job. That is how we were brought up. You put in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.
Ryan Bruckelmyer
How we sell
An advisor, not a salesman
There is a difference between a supplier who can read a spec sheet back to you and one who has stood on a site at six in the morning watching the weather turn. We have worked alongside site prep crews and foundation crews for decades. We know how this board behaves in cold, in wet, under equipment, and we know the situations where it is the wrong answer.
On a complex job the last thing anyone needs is a supplier who does not know what is going on. Ask us what will happen and you will get a straight answer, including when the answer is that you do not need the upgrade.
Why this foam
The forms used to fall down while you poured
Ryan describes how it was done when he started: frame the outside of a slab with lumber, lay foam against it, tape the foam up, and accept what came next.
The foam would fall down as you are pouring, and you just say, oh well, there is nothing you can do about it.
Ryan Bruckelmyer, on the old way
- Now the form holds the concrete with no wood behind it at all.
- Crews drive over it. A power buggy crosses 40 psi without damaging the board, which can remove the pump truck from the job entirely.
- The half inch flexes. Enough to run a curve, which Ryan says he has never managed with another manufacturer's board.
Who works here
Nobody here is learning what foam is
We hire for the same things every time: honest, on time, and looking for a career rather than a season. Caleb came on early and has worked with foam for most of his adult life.
We are not getting people out of college and trying to explain what foam is to them. The people working for us have worked with it for years, and they already know this foam is superior to what we used in the past.
Ryan Bruckelmyer
What comes next
Training the next generation on what foam can do
This material has changed faster than the trade's habits have. Plenty of experienced builders are still specifying what they specified fifteen years ago, because nobody has shown them what the higher grades now make possible.
So part of the job is teaching. Our own crews, other contractors, other suppliers. Ryan has five children and three of them work in the trade, which tends to keep a person focused on what gets handed on.
Supply
The exclusive Midwest distributor
Our board is manufactured for us by Eco Carbon Foam in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and we are the only distributor carrying it in the Midwest. Eighty five percent of the finished product is post-consumer material collected in the United States.
The practical benefit of that arrangement is stability. Our supply agreement caps price movement, so we are far less exposed to the petrochemical swings that push conventional foam pricing around mid-project.
Pick your material, pick your delivery date
Order online or text your reorder. We schedule the drop and it lands on site when your crew needs it.