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The Linthicum residence in San Luis Obispo is under construction using NUDURA's Integrated Building Technology.

Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF)

The Future of Wall Construction...

Home buyers today want more than simple shelter from the elements. They want their home to fit their lifestyle and values – values that increasingly demand beauty, high quality and long-lasting construction, greater comfort, safety and energy efficiency, cost efficiency, and intelligent use of our limited natural resources.

It is no longer possible to meet these expectations with the old practice of building with wood framing. Responsible builders and home buyers are therefore looking for new sustainable building solutions and technology. Interestingly, what they are finding is an innovative modern adaptation of a centuries-old technology using the most proven building material on earth - Concrete.

Rapid advances in building materials combined with a heightened concern about the environment has given rise to this modern adaptation in concrete homebuilding technology – Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF).

Wall construction using Insulated Concrete Forms is the building solution that paves the way for builders and home buyers to build beautiful concrete homes in any style with all the added benefits they demand, like energy efficiency, safety, and peace and quiet. Concrete is simply a better way to build a better home, and Insulated Concrete Forms are the better way to build with concrete.

ICF Benefits

Insulating Concrete Forms (ICFs) give you all the benefits that have made concrete the material of choice for home building worldwide: Solid, lasting construction that resists the ravages of fire, wind, and time. But ICFs do plain concrete one better – or rather, two better – by giving you two built-in layers of foam insulation.

This gives an ICF home some sizable advantages over an ordinary stick-built home - greater energy efficiency, more peace and quiet, more day-to-day living comfort. All wrapped up in a solid, high-quality building package that gives an ICF home an utterly remarkable feel that really has to be experienced to be believed. As soon as you step inside, you can tell that an ICF home is not an ordinary house. It’s not just beautiful, comfortable and quiet. You can feel that it’s solid, built to last.

Building with ICFs is also cost-effective. You can get superior ICF technology for a lot less than you think. ICFs are so efficient and easy to build with that the cost of building an ICF house is comparable to that of an ordinary 2x6 wood-framed house. But you get so much more home for your money!

ICF Technology

ICFs are basically forms for poured concrete walls, but that stay in place as a permanent part of the wall assembly. The forms, made of polystyrene foam insulation, are either pre-formed interlocking blocks or easier-to-use interlocking panels. The left-in-place forms not only provide a continuous insulation and sound barrier, but also a backing for the “skin” of your choice - drywall on the inside, and stucco, lap siding, or brick on the outside.

Within these two basic ICF types, individual systems can vary in their design. "Flat" systems yield a continuous thickness of concrete, like a conventionally poured wall. The wall produced by "grid" systems has a waffle pattern where the concrete is thicker at some points than others. "Post and beam" systems have just that – discrete horizontal and vertical columns of concrete that are completely encapsulated in foam insulation. All major ICF systems are engineer-designed, code-accepted, and field-proven.

The insulating capacity of expanded polystyrene combined with the structural strength and thermal mass of concrete makes ICF walls stronger, safer, more comfortable and more energy efficient than typical residential walls. In various tests, ICF walls have met and in many cases exceeded statutory building codes.

Energy Efficiency

It is pretty obvious why concrete homes are more energy efficient than wood-frame homes. The mass of concrete slows down the passage of heat moving through the wall. This means that, with the same insulation, a concrete home stays warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than a wood-frame home. Also, a concrete wall doesn't have as many air leaks as a wood-frame wall - and air leakage accounts for a large percentage of energy loss in the home.

Besides having the advantage of mass, today's ICF concrete home building systems all utilize cost effective, highly efficient insulation to keep your home dry and comfortable year round while enjoying the benefits of lower utility bills.

Concrete forms an integral wall - solid, continuous and airtight. By comparison, a wood-frame wall is a collection of components - studs, sheet rock, sheathing and insulation. Each joint and connection is a potential air leak. As the air passes through these leaks, it takes your heating and air conditioning with it.

When designing today's concrete home, smart builders are able to realize considerable savings by using concrete's energy efficiency to justify smaller heating and air conditioning systems. This results in a comfortable home with correspondingly smaller heating and air conditioning bills. The bottom line - savings are realized up front and throughout the life of a home.

Energy savings and comfort are built into every ICF system. ICFs start with a high R-Value. Four to five inches of ASTM C 578 polystyrene foam insulation, combined with a five inch concrete wall in a typical ICF system – are rated above R-17 at 75 degrees mean test temperature.

This combination of high R-values, low air infiltration, and high thermal mass is believed to account for the amazing 25% to 50% energy savings of ICF versus wood or steel-framed homes.

Peace and Quiet

Land for homebuilding is becoming more scarce and we're forced to build our homes closer together and near noise sources like highways, railways, and airports. Concrete homes provide the necessary sound reducing qualities to provide the kind of quiet comfort we all look for in a home.

The greater mass of concrete walls can reduce sound penetrating through a wall by over 80 percent when compared to wood-frame construction. Although some sound will penetrate the windows, a concrete home is often two-thirds quieter than a wood-frame home. With double-glazed windows in ICF walls and beefed-up roof insulation, you will rarely hear street noises or airport traffic.

New ICF homeowners almost always remark on how unbelievably quiet their new house is, compared with their old stick-build home. They expect the new-found comfort and energy efficiency, but the peace and quiet – the protection from outside noise – never fails to surprise and delight them.

Safe and Secure Investment

The high-mass walls of an ICF home not only give it a remarkably solid feel, but they also make it safer for the family. And make it a remarkably solid and secure investment, too. Concrete homes have a proven track record of withstanding the ravages of hurricanes, tornadoes and fires, when all the stick-build houses around them are in ruins.

When disaster threatens in the form of hurricanes, tornadoes or wild fires, your family will be safer in a home constructed with concrete walls. It's no accident that concrete is the material of choice for modern day fortresses and disaster shelters. This strong, durable material stands up to the fury of nature...including the more subtle threats of rot, rust and termites. Today's strongest residential wall systems are made of concrete.

In fire wall tests, ICFs stood exposure to intense flame without structural failure longer than did common frame walls. The polystyrene foam used in most ICF forms is treated so it will not support combustion. Also, tests show that its tendency to transmit an outside flame source is less than that of most wood products.

Many insurance carriers are now offering a discount on a home owner’s policy for an ICF home.

Low Maintenance Costs

The beauty of a concrete home is that it requires far less work on the part of the homeowner to keep it looking like new. What are the three most common causes of exterior wall maintenance? Termites, rotting and paint peeling or fading. Concrete homes are rarely, if ever affected by termites or rot. As to paint, while some contemporary concrete homes have wood siding, most have a stucco or brick facade. Some use a concrete texture or other concrete products as finishes. None require painting.

All of this translates into a concrete home costing less to own than a wood-frame or wood veneer home.

Part of maintaining a home over the course of its lifetime involves repair of damage from such elements of nature as rain, wind and termites. A concrete wall is more resistant to the wind and rain of hurricanes, tornadoes and other major windstorms. When Hurricane Andrew roared through South Florida, concrete homes protected families far better than their wood-frame counterparts. Homes built with concrete walls can also be designed to withstand the destructive forces of earthquakes.

With ICF homes, the equation is simple. No Rot = Less Repair and Maintenance. Neither polystyrene nor concrete will ever rot or rust. Concrete can even be exposed to the elements for centuries with few ill effects. Reinforcing steel, buried deep inside and protected by concrete’s alkalinity, does not corrode.

Healthier Home and Environment

In this age of vanishing resources, we must choose our building materials more wisely, balancing the expenditure of natural resources with the benefits of a material over its useful life. Concrete draws upon some of the earth's most common and abundant minerals for its raw materials. The amount of land used to extract the materials needed to make concrete is only a fraction of that used to cut down our forests for lumber.

Concrete homes are more energy efficient than wood-frame homes and therefore require less energy to heat and cool. This reduces the amount of so-called green house gases produced by power generation plants.

Portland cement, which makes up about 10 percent of concrete, is manufactured from limestone, clay and sand. Scrap tires and other combustible waste that would otherwise take valuable land in land fills are often used as a fuel source in the cement manufacturing process. Sources of aggregates are diverse and plentiful: sand, gravel, crushed stone, and an ever-increasing array of consumer and industrial waste products - fly ash from coal burning electric power plants and blast furnace slag from steel mills. Crushed concrete from demolition is often used as aggregate for concrete. Concrete's nearly inert matrix of materials makes it an ideal recycling medium, with absolutely no degradation of strength or performance.

Building with ICFs is healthier for the environment in a number of ways: by minimizing the number of different building products involved in construction, by reducing the amount of waste generated on the construction site, and by lowering energy requirements for heating and cooling.

Healthy Living

ICF homes provide a healthy indoor environment too, since concrete it is practically inert, and requires no volatile organic-based preservatives like wood does. It's naturally waterproof and fire-resistant, so it doesn't need special coatings or sealers. Concrete can also be easily cleaned with organic, non-toxic substances

The measurement of the air contents of actual ICF houses shows an almost complete absence of any emissions.

Flexible Designs

ICF homes can be designed in any style, and will accept any traditional exterior finish including vinyl or wood siding, stucco and brick. Because custom angles and curves are easily created, it’s simple to build in bows, bays and radiuses. And ICF systems accommodate any of today’s most popular design features, such as tall walls, large openings, long floor spans, and cathedral ceilings.

Internationally Proven & Code-Accepted

Originally developed in Europe (where concrete home building is standard) ICF systems have been used successfully around the world for more than 30 years. Thousands of ICF homes have been built in recent years throughout the United States and Canada. They have proven successful in every region and climate, from Orlando to Calgary. ICF systems are accepted by all the major model codes in the U.S., and by the R-2000 program in Canada.

Fast & Easy to Build

Although it looks new and different, anyone with construction experience can quickly get up to speed with ICFs. An ideal crew has a mix of concrete placement and carpentry experience. Once the crew has some practice, each ICF-build home requires less skilled labor and less total labor than a wood-framed home. And ICFs are very lightweight, so crews stay fresh through the day.

Likewise, ICFs present no problem for the sub-contractors who come after the walls are poured. Since holes, chases and rectangles are easily cut into ICFs with a knife or saw, installation of mechanical systems is a snap. The fastening of drywall and lap siding is just as fast and easy. And mid-course corrections, such as moving an opening, are no big deal – just saw it out and re-form. It’s not more difficult to make changes to an ICF wall – it’s just different.

Cost Competitive

Over the last ten years, concrete prices have been remarkably stable. Recent price increases in other materials have generated interest in concrete building systems as never before. Labor savings and readily available materials make ICFs, feature for feature, one of the most cost competitive wall systems in housing markets.

Add in the lower ongoing costs of owning an ICF home with lower energy bills, insurance premiums and repair costs and its obvious why Insulated Concrete Forms are the future of wall construction.