Insulated concrete forms (ICF's) are changing the face of home building and construction. It used to be that you had limited options if you were building a new house. Conventional wood frame wall construction dominated the home building market. All of the building trades almost reached a point where they didn't know how to do anything but wood frame walls when it came to building a new house.
You could get a house with all brick walls if you wanted one but even that became little more than a masonry facade over a wood frame construction core. The need for high wall insulation for heating and cooling made it impractical to have an all brick house without insulation so the all brick house ended up evolving into a wood frame building with a brick veneer or facade.
All concrete houses were simply ugly 40 years ago. The building trades didn't really have many cost effective options for finishing off the outside of a concrete wall so it ended up bare or painted. The look became popular with office and government buildings but it was terrible for homes. And of course the problem with insulation was just as bad with concrete walls as it was with brick walls.
All of that has now changed with the invention of ICF's. The concept is really very simple. An ICF combines a conventional reinforced concrete wall with modern rigid foam insulation and does so in a way that is labor and material efficient and cost effective. Most ICF's today are made up of 3 basic parts. The first part is the inner layer of rigid foam insulation. Each piece is usually 2 to 3 inches thick, 30 to 40 inches long and 12 to 16 inches high. You cut and interlock as many pieces as you need to form the inside of the wall. The second part is the outer layer of foam. Usually it is identical to the inner layer of foam but many companies now have provision on the outside for attaching vinyl or wood siding or some other outside house finish. The third part to the system are wire or plastic connectors that connect the outer foam to the inner foam with a 4 to 12 inch gap in between for pouring the reinforced concrete wall. So when the wall is done you end up with a sandwich of 3 layers. Rigid foam insulation, then reinforced concrete wall and then another layer of rigid foam insulation. Because of the connectors the foam becomes a permanent part of the wall and building.
With old-fashioned concrete walls you had to construct a form to hold the concrete in place while it cured and then remove the form after the concrete was hard. A lot of work was involved and you ended up with a wall that was strong but had almost no insulation value. But with ICF's the foam does four things all at once. It acts as the form for the concrete, insulates the wall, forms a vapor barrier for the wall and also acts as an excellent surface for attaching inside and outside final finishes. It goes in easy and you don't remove it when the concrete is cured. You can use ICF's from the footings of a building all the way up to the roof. You end up with a building wall that is superior in almost every way. Much stronger walls, magnificent sound barrier and thermal mass advantages, easier to heat and cool and no wood to rot and grow Mold are all powerful advantages of ICF construction. Because the outside siding options are the same with either ICF's or conventional wood frame construction your home will fit into the neighborhood perfectly. From the outside the only thing that would look different is the walls are thicker compared to a wood frame building.
Michael Russell Your Independent Building guide.
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