I Thought My In-Laws Were Just Selling Expensive Foam—Then One South Dakota Winter Changed My Mind

By Erica Scherrer

When I first met my husband’s family, the Scherrers, I learned that they had invented a product called InSoFast. To be honest, my initial reaction wasn’t exactly enthusiastic.

I remember thinking, “These people are selling foam at an outrageous cost to the building market.”

I’ve never been someone who blindly follows what people tell me. I tend to question everything and like to see proof for myself. So while I respected my husband Matt and his dad, Ed—the inventor of InSoFast—I remained skeptical.

Then life gave me a firsthand lesson.

After Matt and I got married, we found ourselves in a season of transition. We were deciding where we wanted to plant our roots and raise our family, so we moved into my in-laws’ basement in South Dakota with our first child, who was around ten months old.

Very quickly, I learned just how frigid South Dakota winters can be.

The basement was cold. Not just a little chilly, but the kind of cold that settles into your bones and makes it difficult to get comfortable. As a new mom, I worried constantly about our baby being cold at night. Like most parents, I wanted our child to be comfortable and sleep well, but the cold basement made that difficult.

That’s when Matt and his dad told me they had a solution.

Their answer was to insulate the basement walls and floors using InSoFast’s 2.5-inch EXi basement insulation panels. 

I’ll admit, I still had my doubts.

But after the installation was complete, everything changed.

After that very first night, I realized they weren’t just selling “foam.”

The difference was incredible.

The basement felt warmer, more comfortable, and far more inviting. The cold that had once radiated from the walls and floors was gone. For the first time since moving in, I slept soundly through the night.

Even better, our infant finally started sleeping longer stretches at night.

As any parent knows, when your baby sleeps better, everyone sleeps better.

What impressed me the most wasn’t just that the room felt warmer—it was how dramatically the comfort of the entire space changed. The basement became a place where our family could truly relax instead of bundling up and trying to stay warm.

That experience completely changed my perspective on InSoFast.

I went from being someone who thought my in-laws were simply selling expensive foam to someone who experienced firsthand the value of proper continuous insulation. I saw how much of a difference it made in our daily lives, our comfort, and even our sleep.

Today, when people ask me about InSoFast, I don’t think about R-values or building science first. I think about that winter in South Dakota, living in my in-laws’ basement with a ten-month-old baby, and how a product I once questioned ended up making one of the coldest seasons of our lives infinitely more comfortable.

Sometimes you don’t truly understand the value of a product until you experience it yourself.

For me, one cold South Dakota winter was all the proof I needed.