![]() Walls made with Insulated Concrete Forms insulate sound better than traditional walls, so your home will be quieter. With a more consistent temperature throughout the home, there is typically less need to change the thermostat up and down. ![]() The benefit of a less drafty home is the way the home feels and lives. In fact, it takes almost three days for radiation, convection, or thermal heat transfer to make it through the exterior wall. ICF walls are also less drafty than wood-frame walls. That means less energy is required to heat and cool your home – a savings of 20% to 50%!Īn independent study conducted by CLEB Lab concluded that an ICF wall provided 58% greater R-value and 43% energy-savings compared to the wood-frame wall. Whereas wood frame walls do not have consistency and max out at R-19, but typically range from R-9 to R-15. With insulation on both sides of the concrete, your wall temperatures won’t change throughout the day, achieving a consistent R-23. Other homes in the neighborhood were completely consumed by flames, but this one, built with ICF, survived. This home built with Insulated Concrete Forms narrowly escaped destruction in 2018’s California’s wildfires, which burned 18,804 structures and took 85 lives. ![]() That also helps prevent the spread of fire from your home to another, stopping the fire when it reaches your exterior walls. Even if a fire ravages the inside of your home, the walls will stand through a fire. However, there are significant savings realized from using ICF, and that will be discussed later. Once you factor in additional costs like concrete, rebar, hardware, labor, insurance, etc, the average total cost using ICF forms can be around 15-20% more than stud framing. ICF forms cost an average of $3.50 to $4.00 per square foot. While it used to be considered expensive to build with ICF, lumber framing labor has finally all but caught up with the cost of ICF construction, making it a comparable and affordable option for homeowners. So, the time savings can be significant, depending on the design of the home. Plus, the ICF system is designed to allow moisture to exit the frame inherently. Concrete, however, is not subject to the same degradation. So there are dual-layer and even triple-layer protection systems involved in protecting a wood frame from moisture. Wood will degrade and rot if not properly protected from moisture. Also, one of the most time-consuming and yet important aspects of wood framing are all the many steps required to protect a wood frame from moisture. That’s because ICF saves steps in both the exterior and interior construction. There are a wide variety of benefits to using ICF compared to wood-frame building.īuilding with ICF may cut 2-4 months off the construction time of your home.
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