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Better Construction
A better place to live has solid walls and floors. The exterior walls provide a draft-free barrier to heat, cold, or noise outside, providing a comfortable, cost effective, and quiet environment inside. The interior walls and floors don’t bounce or creak or rattle as the family moves through the house. All of the structural materials resist pests such as termites, and their surfaces, inside and out, need little if any maintenance.
Insulated Concrete Forms 
Insulated Concrete Forms are abbreviated ICF. On the one hand, ICF’s are fun. They’re like styrofoam lego blocks that stack together just like the toy version, in order to create a stay-in-place form into which concrete is poured. On the other hand, ICF’s are a very serious method of building a protective cocoon around a house.
When completed, an ICF wall has a thickness of concrete in the middle, plus a continuous coverage of styrofoam on both sides. The base of the concrete connects directly to the footing. The top is generally capped off at a floor or roof line.Heat can be transfered in three ways, and ICF blocks them all.
- The first method is radiation. You feel the heat of the sun on your skin as it touches you. Certain frequencies of this radiation can go straight through a wood frame house. The concrete inside ICF stops it cold.
- The second heat transfer method is conduction. When you pick up a cold glass of ice water, the cold ice cubes touch the cold water, which touches the cold glass, which touches your soon-to-be-cold hand. The heat is actually going in the opposite direction, being suck out of your hand and eventually into the ice cube, by conducting through the various materials in contact. The styroforam.
- The third method is convection. Like in a convection oven, convection uses a moving gas or liquid to transfer head. When your house is not well sealed, cold air may seep in through hundreds of very small cracks. ICF construction produces a very tight house, stopping convection completely.
Compare this to traditional wood frame construction with fiberglass insulation.
- They are poor at stopping radiation. Only select frequencies of radiation are stopped. The others go right on through the wall.
- They do a decent job at stoping conduction, however, because wood is generally a good insulator.
- They are also poor at stopping convection. There are many leaky cracks, and even the fiberglass insulation is more of a filter slowdown than a thermal barrier. Cold air can flow right though it.
But ICF has SEVERAL HUMONGOUS additional bonus features:
- The concrete provides a thermal mass to stabilize the inside temperature. During the day as the outside heats, the concrete absorbs that heat rather than letting it heat the interior. Then at night as the outside cools, the concrete can provide some of that stored heat to the interior to keep it from cooling as well. In general, temperatures inside an ICF house vary from time to time and floor to ceiling by less than a degree or two. Traditional houses have variations of at least 5 and often 10 or more degrees.
- The solid concrete provides a great sound barrier.
- The solid concrete may also serve as integral component of a hurricane or tornado resistant structure system
Once you’ve gone to ICF, you won’t go back.Laurel Brook Lodge, LLC, has researched the market for available ICF products. We have determined that PolySteel is simply the best. Because of their quality and customer support, we endorse PolySteel and Polysteel Southeast Distributors.
Steel Framing
It won’t rot. Termites can’t eat it. It won’t warp. Nails don’t back out on their own over time. ‘Nuf said.
Steel framing for the interior walls and the roof system makes a powerful teammate for ICF exterior walls. Truss floor systems can be designed to handle significantly higher live loads, thus eliminating floor bounce that rattles everything in the room. The trusses also provide ample openings for routing utilities through the floor. For the walls, screws must be used for hanging drywall and cabinets. This may require some extra labor at first, but it pays off later with the solid structure with not a single nail backing out of the drywall. And steel doesn’t warp, so the walls remain as straight as the day they were constructed.
Because of the quality of their materials, design, and design services, REPco Industries Inc. is endorsed by Laurel Brook Lodge, Inc.
ICF Below Grade with Steel Framing
In the past, ICF was not allowed below grade because of termites. The foam was not food for the termites. However, the termites could boar through the foam in search of wood to eat. This problem has been eliminated by adding to the foam a borate compound (similar to the active ingredient in 40 Muel Team Borax). The borate kills the termites and prevents them from using it as a foraging path. The official building code has acknowledged this fact and now includes a special exception for borate-enhanced ICF, allowing this foam product to be used below grade.
Steel framing helps with this even further. Even if termites were to stubornly trek through the forbidding borate-enhanced ICF foam, they would find starvation at the end of their voyage. No wood. Just steel. In fact, use of steel framing is another exception to the building code, where even regular foam could be used below grade.
Therefore, the combination of borate-enhanced foam and inedible steel framing serve as a two-line defense again termite invation. As a ersult, the ICF below grade brings its excellent thermal barrier and thermal mass characteristics all the way down through the basement and to the footing, completing the cocoon wrapping around the sides of the house.
Sealed Attic with Spray Insulation
Speaking of the cocoon around the house, there’s still the question of insulating the roof system. The roof system consists of steel trusses topped by either wood decking and shingles or directly with steel roofing. Between the roof and the ceiling, of course, is the attic. Traditional building puts insulation on the ceiling and then ventilates the attic to the outside. It turns out that this is the best way to build a house — somewhere else, but not here. In northern climates, this construction technique greatly reduces icing problems on the roof. In hot humid climates like Georgia, this construction technique actually creates condensation damage in the attic every cool night after a hot humid day. Today, building scientists recommend that attics be sealed complete, with the insulation right against the back side of the roof decking, between the rafters or truss top chords. Experiment has shown that this does not adversely effect the lifetime of the shingles on the other side. Meanwhile, the attic now becomes semi-conditioned space. (A larger HVAC system is not required because the ICF and spray insulation and tightness of the house have already reduced its size by roughly a factor of two.) Attic temperature remains just a few degrees above or below the ambient room conditions.
So, with the sealed attic, the insulation must be applied to the underside of the roof and into the eaves enough to connect with the insulated wall. Expanding spray foam or cellulose does the job. There are various products available, some open cell and some closed cell. The closed cell sprays would seem better because, unlike the leaky filter of the fiberglass insulation, the spray will help seal the house and prevent air infiltration (convection of heat).
As a part of the complete insulation system, the spray insulation must totally encapsulate the roof system, and effectively connect with the ICF walls. When done properly, heating and cooling costs are dramatically decreased.
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