Costs And Benefits Of Insulating Concrete Forms For: Fill & Download for Free

Absolutely it is possible. I personally built a 10,000 square feet apartment in Seattle which we turned into a hotel finished in 2015. ALL floors, ceilings interior and exterior walls are concrete. It is warm, quiet, and dry.It is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Because of the super insulated concrete, it is super tight and costs almost nothing to heat.From the rains, it is cold and moist in Seattle between October and May. Most of all, we probably have the biggest earthquakes in the Country. We are in the Cascadia subduction zone.What is the secret?When concrete becomes cold in damp climates, it will lower the dew point and collect moisture on the concrete or sweat. Exterior rigid insulation is a must and there are benefits to large thermal mass on the inside.We are insulated with ICF or insulated concrete forms and rigid insulation under the basement slabs (probably 30% of heat loss) and rigid on ceiling. It is a LEED platinum building basically. However, I did not obtain that certification.Concrete buildings are very tight and will become moist without proper ventilation.Heat recovery ventilators provide continuous ventilation and comfort while recovering the heat from the exhausted moist air. We have one on each of the five floors.All 5 floors are concrete. They contain 3/4″ PEX tubing for heating and with hydronic hot water. Radiant heat is not only very efficient but is also comfortable. The thermal mass allows me to heat at night and stay warm all day. We run off the hot water heater for the building so I do not have duplicate heating systems.The huge thermal mass prevents large temperatures swings and this keeps the building temperature constant. Cool in summer, warm in winter. Who can argue with that!This building is designed to local code. My structural engineer states that it will survive the 9.0 earthquake that is coming. Every 300–700 years we get full rip of Juan de Fuca plate. We are due any year now as it has been almost 300 years.It is very expensive to build out of concrete. But the building has had no maintenance costs after 5 years. This building hard costs were $300 per foot and is probably 20% more expensive. It is 5 floors and we do have high end finishes as you can see from the pic. I like old architecture. I made it appear as though it is 100 years old but with extremely current and modern technology/ architectural engineering.This building is entirely built with concrete and has absolutely no interior framing at all (as they are all concrete). Exterior walls are 6 inches thick and the interior walls are 4-6 inches thick. Also, the exterior is 3 part stucco.Steel reinforcement in the concrete is with HELIX metal fiber shorts (14mm twisted steel, coated to prevent rust) and interior #4 rebar steel around windows, doors and Dowling as well as two courses of #4 rebar on the top of all interior and exterior walls. We have lots of steel rebar in footing and basement perimeter wall. The basement walls are 8″ thick.We CNC routed the decorative dental brackets and knuckles out of marine plywood and the windows are recessed to break up the large flat surfaces.The 30″ overhang keeps the building dry and clean.Each floor we would build the exterior with ICF and then frame up the interior walls with the Simon concrete forms. We then added the VERCO pan dec and placed on the Simon form. The steel is added to the walls around windows, doors, and top course had 2 #4 rebar. Interior and exterior stairs were formed. Radiant heat tubes were added. We then poured the stairs, walls and the floor at the same pour. We needed a huge pump truck and around 1000 yards of concrete in total I believe.This was very, very hard construction. Our lot is 4000 square feet and we have a 10,000 sq feet building. There is no alley either. During the construction and concrete pours, we had two concrete form blow-outs, one was about a yard of concrete that blew out the Simon form. We simply let it firm up and continued to pour and then stripped after 4 hours or so and chiseled it down and flat. Mostly our ICF’s held up well. I still have Panic attacks whenever I hear a Cement trucking backing up.We had 5 leaks in the concrete of the 50 loops. They were easy to spot as the made the concrete appear wet. Fixing them was a pain in the neck as the concrete was approaching 6000 psi and needed to be roto hammered out and repaired.

What is the average life of American houses? Why are they not mostly made of concrete?A wood frame house can stand indefinitely if properly maintained, barring natural disasters.In Canada where it’s similar, insulating concrete form construction does offer significant benefits over wood frame construction but it’s a process not many builders are familiar with, and it also typically adds cost which becomes an influencing factor in price-sensitive markets.For more, see: ICF home construction - YouTube

Cost. It is definitely more costly to build homes out of concrete. Part of this is because the materials, but part of the cost also comes from extra labor (see #2).Difficulty. It is not only harder to build with concrete in the first place, it is harder to correct mistakes or remodel in the future. And it’s not only the wall framing that is more difficult. The mechanical side of the house becomes more difficult also: plumbing, electrical, and HVAC all become more difficult. The foam concrete forms that stay in place after pouring the walls help to make this easier, but it’s still harder to run wiring and pipes through the 2–5/8″ foam than through a stud-framed wall.Advantages don’t outweigh the cost/difficulty. We’ve built both types of houses, and when someone goes with foam, concrete-form walls (the very best type of construction technique for a house in my opinion), it’s almost always for the same reason someone would buy, say, a BMW 5-series 4-door sedan vs. a Toyota Camry 4-door sedan. Is the BMW better? A little bit. It’s just a touch more refined, probably has a few advanced features, probably handles a touch better, etc. But is it really worth $80,000 vs. $34,000 in order to get a car that really does pretty much the same thing? They both get you to where you’re going and do a pretty darn good job at it. So a 8″ core, foam concrete form wall IS better. It has an R-25+ rating (but R-50 if you consider the benefit of a thermal mass), will never rot, and you could set off a 1000lb. bomb outside your house and it will hardly crack. That being said, a 2x6 wall can have R-19 + R-6 if you use 1″ of polyisocyanurate foam boards outside the studs. Even with the extra foam layer it’s way cheaper than building with concrete, it’s a renewable resource, and the foam is non-toxic and on the green side of insulating foams.So in the end, it comes down to the fact that the advantages don’t outweigh the extra costs. Like LED light bulbs, if the extra cost ever starts approaching the energy savings it affords, it will explode and become much more common. If you can afford it, foam concrete form walls will make a more comfortable home, even if only by a little bit. But that’s the reason: IF you can afford it.