Insulated Concrete Will Help You Build a Non-Typical Home

The traditional home in the United States is built with a few main materials. Typically, foundations are made of concrete. Above the foundation, builders will construct walls of wood studs. A roof made of wood and eventually covered with tar or ceramic shingles sits on top of the walls. Other necessary materials include insulation, a plastic seal and then various metals and plastic for plumbing, electrical, and the heating and cooling system. These traditional homes have improved over the years, but is there a better way?

Using insulated concrete forms (ICF), a builder can give a home owner a home of great strength that is very well insulated. An ICF house is built using foam forms that are stacked on top of one another and snapped into place. The forms are made of foam and wet cement is poured into the hollow center area. A big change for some people who are used to forms being used to create a foundation is that the foam forms are left sealed to the concrete; thus, the home has large amounts of insulation.

The large amounts of insulation equal a high R-value of forty to fifty. This results in lower heating and cooling costs which means that an ICF distributor can happily sell ICF products to people in extreme hot or cold climate in need of well insulated homes.

This is a new building technology that the traditional stick home cannot compare to. Even past concrete homes cannot compare to this new way of building. In the past insulating concrete homes were cumbersome and difficult. Fir strips had to be attached to walls, or inner stud walls needed to be erected; either way, insulation was then attached to the inner wall. As written earlier, the insulation of an ICF home makes the form that the cement is poured into. This eliminates any need for more insulation in the wall, wood fir strips or studs, and plastic for vapor barriers.