Styrofoam homes: Is this the answer to the housing crunch?????

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,20967,1052051,00.html

A house made of Styrofoam? Sounds flimsy. But spray it with a new brick-like concoction called Grancrete, and it’s virtually indestructible. Invented by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and builders at Casa Grande, a construction firm in Mechanicsville, Virginia, Grancrete is twice as strong as structural concrete and won’t leak or crack. It’s also affordable: When the first bags roll off the production line later this month, builders will be able raise a home for $10 a square foot, compared with $150 for a standard U.S. home.
Traditional concrete, composed of calcite, water and sand or stone, can take up to three weeks to harden. Grancrete dries in one day. Its main ingredients—magnesium oxide and potassium phosphate—form tighter bonds than those in the concrete mixture. Load the slurry into a handheld pump, spray it over a Styrofoam frame, and you’ve got a home in 24 hours flat.

:D

I'm not sure I would want my house to biodegrade. Might do it at the wrong moment.

Bryant
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and poison any firefighter who gets a lungful of the smoke

They houses are made by inflating a rubber dome covered in concrete. The concrete sets and the rubber dome is removed creating a instahouse. Made in at least. Built in under 1 week.

I think it is fireproof. No flame to the styro, no burn??

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Long range planning, though. Must see how long my husband's job holds out.

Can sky-lights be set in the tops of these?

has held up great. He covered it with fiberglass and something else. Built it for $50. Had built a bathtub and "ice-box" out of the material too. The only thing he bought was the stove (freight damaged) and frame. The skylight was over the dining table which switched to a bed a night. You could lie in bed and watch the stars.

Dad was the inventor/tinkerer type. Built a prototype Mr. Coffee long before they hit the market and an "inflatable" tent (the ribs inflated and kept it up.)

I think homes out of this stuff sounds great.

"You dropped a house on my sister ... but that's OK. She survived."

All of us are "Conservatives".

Now only if contractors would pass the savings on to consumers. I'd love to see one of these homes.

According to experiments, Grancrete is stronger than concrete, is fire resistant and can
withstand both tropical and sub-freezing temperatures, making it ideal for a broad range of
geographical locations. It insulates so well that it keeps dwellings in arid regions cool, and
those in frigid regions warm. Currently Grancrete is sprayed onto Styrofoam walls, to which it
adheres and dries. The Styrofoam remains in place as an effective insulator, although Dr. Wagh
suggests simpler walls, such as woven fiber mats, also work well and further reduce the raw
materials required.

at http://www.techtransfer.anl.gov/docs/Grancrete%20R&D100.pdf

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/homestead/2005-February/004074.html

It sounds amazing.

this material from becoming a genuine solution to a serious problem, because of course, they can't benefit from it.

on commercial property facades. Particularly when you want to rehab a building with virtually no appealing design elements. You put up styrofoam board on top of the old stuff, and spray coat it to create a faux stucco/stone look. They've been using this as a residential home facade on top of stick built too. There have been some problems with moisture, but I think they've worked out the kinks.

In a sense, styrofoam is the modern equivalent of straw bale. I doubt if fire will be a large issue here. If the product is encased in concrete, it can't breathe and neither could a flame.

two sheets of styrofoam reenforced with rebar. Once the styrofoam was placed in the shape the house was to take, concrete was poured between the styrofoam sheets forming a wall that would not rot, bugs would not eat, and fire would take three hours to move from one room to another.

Any kind of exterior from brick or stone to wood to aluminum or vinyl siding was possible for these houses.

Blue Max is no longer available in our area, and the only answer I gotten for the folks in the store that used to sell the process is a shrug.

The rebar would give it the strength needed for Florida canes. While they are talking about "cheap" houses, Thing about the upscale houses they they could build cheaper than the wood ones today.

You get mold problems. Hope they've figured that out. Mold is our number one Indoor Air Quality problem.

It was quite lovely, until it floated out to sea with the tide.

if I ever get around to building a house.

Sounds like a good idea, and go into business together at the local level.

The reason I don't is the cost of styrofoam insulation.

Styrofoam insulation comes in 4x8 sheets, and I have some that's 3/4" thick for $9.95 per sheet. Styrofoam gives R-5 per inch of thickness, so that stuff I have on the floor is R-3.75. Divide $9.95 by R-3.75 and you get $2.65 per R. That's Home Depot warehouse price; Home Depot is the world's largest seller of expanded polystyrene insulation and sells it cheaper than just about anyone else can buy it.

If you're doing a house these days, you want it to be energy-efficient. We're all liberals here; that stuff matters to us, right? Okay, here's what the Department of Energy says you need in your house in my neighborhood to qualify as having "better" insulation:

Attic: R-49
Wall cavities: R-19
Floor: R-30

Our test house will be 2000 sf. It will be 50 feet long by 40 feet wide. It will have 2400sf roof deck and a cathedral ceiling under a gable roof. And just to make life easy, it will be one huge open area.

We need 63 sheets of R-30 ($79.50 per sheet, or $5008.50) for the floor, 45 sheets of R-19 ($50.35 per sheet, or $2265.75) for the walls up to the gables, 5 more sheets of R-19 for the gables ($251.75), and 75 sheets of R-49 ($129.85 per sheet, or $9738.75) for the roof deck. Not counting the aluminum framework, not counting the Grancrete goop, not counting ANYTHING else--especially labor--you need to pull out $17,264.75 just for the foam in this building. (You can frame out a 2400sf clear-span building using a truss roofing system for a lot less than that.) Add to that all the custom millwork you'll need--stock doors for 2x4 framing are too small, and stock doors for 2x6 framing are too large--and this shit gets expensive quick. I'm getting $6.90 per square foot just for the foam. We haven't bought any millwork, interior finishing, electrical, mechanical, plumbing...and we haven't built the interior walls.

If you insulate the house to "better" standards, the price is comparable to standard framing. If you insulate to DoE "best" standards (R-60 attic, R-21 wall, R-30 floor) it will get really expensive.

Price isn't the reason to use this system. Speed is. If you hump it, you can have a Grancrete building completely ready for millwork installation in four days:

Day 1:
* Build aluminum frame, install foam panels.
* Install pressure-treated jackstuds in window and door openings.
* Install passthrus for plumbing and electrical.
* Spray Grancrete on outside of structure to hold it in place.

Day 2:
* Install interior plumbing and conduit.
* Build interior wall frames and install foam and jackstuds for interior doors.

Day 3:
* Spray Grancrete on interior surfaces.

Day 4:
* Allow one more day for Grancrete to cure.

This makes the Grancrete system really exciting for commercial projects. In a commercial project time is money--I'd give another $10,000 to get my store open a week earlier. Residential projects don't have this problem.

Now! The truly exciting application of Grancrete is Disaster Relief. If you had a one-ton pickup with a trailer, you could bring an 800sf three-room home with two doors and four windows into an area in one trip. In the tropics where they don't need heat and don't have AC, EPS board thickness isn't a problem. You use a bulldozer to clear away the old village, have the village's residents build a community building so they can see how the system locks together, then every family builds their own home. You can have the village under cover within four days.

In summation: it never will be a popular residential option in the US because of cost. If they can market it properly it will be a good commercial choice. But in disaster areas, this will save lives. Lots of them.

I think this Grancrete has an inherent R-factor. As to wall thickness, can't it be anything you want it to be ... to use stock framing components (like doors and windows)?

Concretes have almost no R-value to speak of--R-2.5 for an 8-inch wall built out of concrete block with the holes filled. On an inch-thick Grancrete wall made of two 0.5-inch cementitious matrices, the Grancrete adds R-0.625 to the system. (Concrete has an inherent thermal mass that can help you or hurt you. This isn't calculated into the R-value, which is all about resistance to heat flow. And unfortunately, there's not enough concrete here to give you a good thermal mass.)

You can make the walls any thickness you want, but you either make them thin enough to use 4.5-inch doors (this means the casing is 4.5 inches wide, which a 2x4-studded wall needs), which cuts down insulation and makes your energy bill higher, or thick enough to use 6.5-inch doors, which drives up your mortgage bill because now your walls are more expensive and your millwork's more expensive.

Like I said, this is good for commercial construction, great for disaster relief but too expensive for US residential construction.

If you want to do something quick, cheap and sturdy, look into the Superior Walls system--http://www.superiorwalls.com. Their literature talks about it being a foundation system, but they've built whole houses out of it. Superior Walls is precast concrete wall sections. To rough-in a house with Superior Walls, you clear your building site, level it, put down four inches of compacted crushed stone, and stand back. They come in with the wall sections on flatbed trucks and they bring a crane and a crew. Installation is a matter of putting polyurethane construction adhesive between two sections and bolting them together. The door openings are made so you can use 4.5-inch doors, which are available at all lumberyards. The window openings likewise use 4.5-inch windows. Pricing is a bit lower than 2x4 wood framing, but you can put R-19 insulation in the walls which you can't do with 2x4s. (Added bonus: the wall system already comes with R-12.5 insulation--2.5 inches of styrofoam--cast into it.) There are pathways for wiring and for three water pipes cast into each panel.

The only real limitation on Superior Walls is exterior wall finish. There is no nailing surface on the exterior, so you get to choose between stucco and brick veneer. (Boy, there's a tragedy, huh?)

Look, I see this shit all the time. "Oh, there's a great new innovation in homebuilding that's going to make houses so cheap even Republicans will be able to afford one!" And almost invariably it turns out to be total bullshit. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the big thing was hardboard, or Masonite, siding. They musta sold a billion squares of this product, and now it's all rotting. Then there was Synthetic Stucco, or Exterior Insulation and Finishing System--stucco over a styrofoam lath. With synthetic stucco, your siding does not rot. The frame of your house rots.

Vinyl siding? Great product so long as your favorite color never changes and you don't play golf or cut the grass. You can't paint vinyl siding with anything but polyurethane paint (which is very hard to find, and you can't make it very dark because dark colors collect heat--this is bad when the substrate is heat-sensitive), and a thrown rock or a golf ball with go straight through.

Vinyl windows? These are good...for now. The only real problem they've got is that vinyl is an easily-scratched plastic. After a couple of people have lived in a home and scratched up the windowframes, they'll start looking kinda bad. With a wood window, you can just throw another coat of paint on it and you're golden. A vinyl window, which is sold as something you never have to paint, doesn't give you that option. The great home improvement business thirty or forty years from now's going to be Vinyl Window Renovation...a little jeweler's rouge on a lambswool pad, a few minutes, and the window will look like new again. Fifty dollars, please.

The last seven real innovations in construction that will stand the test of time are:

* platform-frame construction
* the tilt-wash window
* plywood
* oriented-strand board
* drywall
* self-sealing shingles
* fiber-cement

Superior Walls isn't really an innovation--it's just platform-frame construction. It looks exactly like a stud wall that's been dipped in concrete.

and quiet. It was concrete and foam. People from all over came to look at it when it was written up in the paper.

Cheap house, that I can build in the shape of a hexagon and have an inner courtyard, and spray paint purple, without cutting down any trees.

There has to be something wrong with this. Like, as an above poster said -- the housing industry will never let me get my hands on it.

I'm ready to live in a styrofoam house. Why the hell not? Can that thing have central heating/cooling?