Change of plans, now ICF
By mati. Filed in Nudura |Tags: ICF, Nudura
Whenever you plan out a new house project, it often tends to take on a life of its own. There are always factors that are not in your hands, dreams turn into nightmares, the weather turns nasty, people don’t show up, and nature has little tricks up its sleeve.
To all of you people who signed up for my feeds, I have to tell you that the house is no longer going to be a dome. I still believe that a dome is the very best kind of house you can possibly build, but the question is – how are you going to build it?
In our case, we live in rural Colorado, and there is only one person in the vicinity who has a concrete pump. When he didn’t get back to us with a price, I started getting suspicious. So, before we put our plans in for review with the local POA, I told my husband that we better call and find out if he was still interested in letting us use his pump. (This is not just a normal concrete pump – it is the kind that you tow along behind a truck and hook up to a huge compressor so that you can shoot the concrete onto the walls.)
Anyway, the guy didn’t return any calls, so we went to his house, and there was an angry dog in his yard, and his neighbors told us he was not in the area any more. And without a concrete pump, how do you spray a dome?
If we had enough money, we could have hired a crew from monolithic dome institute, I suppose, but we didn’t have that kind of money. So, we quickly had to redraw a new house, which put us back at least a month.
The new house is a square ICF house, 1600 sq ft, one story. ICF is insulated concrete block, and the brand we are using is Nudura.
We chose Nudura ICF because the Nudura blocks are bigger than the other blocks on the market, and also because the blocks clip into each other very nicely. The corners can be used right side up or upside down, so you don’t have to worry about right and left corners.
We made another ICF house in the past, and they are pretty good when it comes to R-value. (Performance R-value is about R-50). The Nudura block also has places that you can screw into every 8 inches, so this makes it easy to hang kitchen cabinets, sheetrock etc.
It is definitely more expensive than a normal framed house, and a bit more time consuming, too, but it makes a very solid and warm house, and concrete walls don’t burn, and neither do they allow mice in.
The biggest difference between a dome and an ICF house is the fact that the dome has heatmass on the inside in the form of 3″ of concrete, so once you heat it up, it holds the heat incredibly well for a long time, and the heating doesn’t have to come on again for hours and hours. The ICF house doesn’t have heatmass on the inside to hold the heat, but when the heating comes on, it instantly heats the house. Therefore, the heating system in an ICF house has to be adjusted to heat the house in a different way. It has to come on often, and for a very short time, just to top up the heat.
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