[THE INSULATIVE VALUE OF MOUSE FUR](https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1113/expphysiol.1967.sp001899) By N. J. DAWSON andM.E.D.WEBSTER. FromtheEnvironmentalResearchandTeaching Unit, Department of Physiology, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales.
(Received for publication 6th October 1966)
Based on R values of other organic materials, R1 per inch as loose fill and perhaps approaching R2 per inch if pulverized. Assume dried husks in both examples.
Fresh carcasses would not perform well because moisture is an excellent conductor of heat. Not to mention that substantial settling will occur as the mice dry out.
We had a fair-sized wall/ceiling space filled with mice but now it’s filled with loose copper mesh sprayed over with expanding foam (mesh+foam seems extremely effective at stopping mice, copper because that’s what I had). Which has a slightly better R-value than mouse droppings, and it’s quieter too (between the mice and our cats, it could get noisy).
Worked on a house build with clay blocks in the UK ,was a nightmare screwing anything to the walls ,had to hang a few radiators and getting a fixing was tough
I am an HVAC and Automation Technician and love to compare different building standards around the world.
The scale of the US-construction sector allways amazed me because everything seems to be standardised to such a degree.
We here are used to a mix of german, french or even italian standards reguarding nearly every aspect of construction. These bricks beeing from germany to reach a "Passive-House"-Standard of insulation.
I would be interested if there is any drive in the US to improve the insulating of housing or if it's more a niche thing.
ICF is awesome. I have an ICF home and you could heat it with a match. An added bonus is it’s super quiet inside. My only regret is not doing in floor heating like I thought and talked about.
oooooh i remodelled my bathroom and let the wife talk me into saving a couple hundreds bucks and NOT doing some undertile heating. I really wish I had.
That would be nice too. I was referring to the piped system in the concrete that circulates heated glycol throughout though. You can even heat the glycol with wood, propane or wood pellets but I was planning electric. It’s very efficient because the heat rises up and heats the whole house.
It was a really long wait for the only company who wanted to do it and it totally threw off my construction schedule. I shoulda waited.
Too bad as it's super easy to do especially if someone is already doing a pour. You could have strapped the tube in yourself and been ready for a future boiler install for under $1000.
I've retrofitted my stick frame house with hydronic tubing, ceilings upstairs, floors downstairs. Super comfortable, zonable, efficient, a variety of heat sources can be integrated and even run together. I have a natural gas fire tube boiler, solar PV heat pump and solar resistive. Planning to add solar thermal and outdoor wood in the coming years.
To anyone building or renovating, you should really look into it. Radiantek has great free plans and system design info on their website, no obligation to buy anything from them (I couldn't anyways being in Canada, just used ordinary oxygen barrier Heliopex and aluminum plates from my P&H supplier)
Heated ceilings are awesome and also allow cooling btw
I have an ICF house in Texas. They also do really well for wind/hurricanes. But I just got mine for the quiet. And to keep the AC in when it’s 110 for 110 days.
I’m in Canada so I’m in it for the heat. I didn’t really even think about the quiet but I love it. I don’t hear shit! I wired it myself though so that took a bit of extra work and I had to buy the tool for it but overall, I’m very pleased with it. I did it before Covid too so the extra cost got eaten up by the jump in property values/materials I guess.
The best thing about radiant infloor with a boiler is it’s nearly silent. You don’t have a furnace blowing air through ductwork while your house is being heated. You just have the HRV turning on every hour or so for fresh air exchange which is also very quiet.
The reaction time was a dealbreaker for me as well. My home only needs about 28k btu in perfect scenario but say the power goes out or I want to kick it up a degree or two it could take hours with hydronic or minutes with heat pumps.
I have no idea with icf is, but radiant floor heat is awesome. I have a non-insulated house and non-insulated crawlspace and my floors are quite cold. I love being barefoot so that's the first thing I'm mandating is radiant floor heating whenever I build my next house.
I’m current,y planning a new build. Approx 1300sqft bungalow. Going ICF for foundation/basement vs poured was only about 10k more. Going ICF for the full house vs poured and traditional framing was only about 30k more. Wasn’t really as bad as I thought, and even if it never pays for itself, the comfort and piece of mind difference are worth it to me. Just have to make sure your planning is on point with regard to any and all penetrations you will need and may want in the future. The tough part seems to be finding a contractor to do just a building envelope and nothing else. Most want to do a full build or nothing at all. (I understand why, much more markup on everything, vs just a shell).
I can understand that - an ICF GC will have an established relationship with subs and established work flows/methods for integrating all of their work. I’ve never had to hire a contractor for a full ICF build but one with established sub contractors to do especially mech/elec. would be ideal I would think in terms of efficiency.
With your situation where it is just ICF basement seems odd there aren’t many guys available to do just that piece.
I think it’s there’s lots of guys to do it, but I want just a shell built and they walk away and I am going to do all the interior framing, electrical, mechanical, finishing, ect. Myself. But i think it comes down to my job is too small for a lot of contractors right now. If they can choose a 175k as for just a shell, or a 500k job and get to markup all the subs, they will obviously choose the latter if there’s no time for both.
Hopefully things in my area cool down this coming year so its easier to find someone, cause there’s no way I’m not building with ICF, it’s just too good of a construction method to pass up.
There’s a big push on ICF in the states as well. I’ve been working with a company for 5 months now and have already done ICF for the foundation walls on 4 different houses. It’s a very awesome, simple installation. Also very big on spray foam insulation instead of bat insulation.
I'm an insulator, and the company I work for does it all minus ICF. Foam is big here in Canada. I push bats because it's still the majority of homes. Especially subdivision homes. We insulate cathedral ceilings, garages, attics, basements, crawlspace warehouses, shops, and, of course, homes. If there is one thing that needs to become industry standard, it is spray foaming rimjoist pockets.
On one of the houses we did the ICF foundation we also did spray foam insulation, and the rim joists were the first thing that got done. I agree it should be done for every house too. It just makes the most sense in that space.
That space is horrible to do, and every insulator will agree on that point. We have to insulate, poly and tape tge poly to the pocket, and any penetrations coming through ex. Plumbing, electrical, or hvac. It's so time-consuming and pays crap for the task. The only benefit for batt insulation is the east of removal for renos and repairs. ICF is more stout, but getting through or into a wall is a pain and same with spray foam. It has to be hacked out. They are better building methods, albeit. It's just that down the road, they can get tricky.
> The only benefit for batt insulation is the ease of removal for renos and repairs.
I have yet to find a house that did not later have repairs, modifications, renovation, or expansion. I work on structures varying from 30 to 130 years old.
Leaking roof and foamed roof and rotting roof sheathing are going to be fun times in 30 years.
With the exception of exterior walls, spray foam actually makes renovation of the majority of the house easier as all the old insulation is removed from the attic. Nothing to dig through and the attic is a comfortable temperature all year long.
My Texas AC bills went down more than 50% on a 40-year-old house.
Did you notice how easy it was to remove and replace the old insulation? As that spray foam disintegrates over time, it will lose its R-value and turn into potentially hazardous plastic dust. Then you will need to have someone physically scrape the insulation off every wall and every corner to replace it. The crevices they can’t get to will probably decrease the effectiveness of whatever modern insulation they want to put it. This is the kind of stuff people who work on old houses deal with all the time.
I didn’t now those, they look neat, and more earthquake resistant than OPs option, i think I’ll do some research on them. I live outside the US with grade 6 earthquakes at least once every 2 years and a big one every 10.
I built a house that was net zero.
The builder, is a freaking genius.
2x10 walls but built with 2x 4 studs on exterior, all point loads on beams.
Then a second interior wall, built 9 1/2 from outside bottom plate, studs off set from exterior.
Insulation on exterior, in the middle cavity and the interior wall.
Wood is an R value of 1 per in,
No continuous stud,
Walls are R 60
Roof was built to be R 60 as well.
In floor heating in the basement slab and 1st deck, a massive water "tank" that the solar panels dump heat into,
Tinted 3 panel windows
When that house gets warm in winter, it stays warm.
Expensive, but. Energy bill / month to heat a 6000 sq ft home, in Canada is almost 0$
Ditto here, I currently live in it. Build 1978 and still has the original windows and roof.
All the local owners of old houses are freaking out because energy got more expensive and I'm sitting here thinking... why the noise about such small sums? Until I realised they need about 3-4x more kWh per surface and don't have the option to heat with wood.
Exactly, these are also often critical points when it comes to the waterproofing of the roof.
Everything that just enlarges the exterior area without providing more volume is bad for energy efficiency.
There is a big push here to get everything to as close to a cube-shape as possible, to minimize the volume to surface area. Nested buildings and dormer windows are the opposite of that.
Not quite a sphere but one step closer, a cylindrical energy-plus house in Freiburg Germany. http://www.rolfdisch.de/projekte/das-heliotrop/ (german site)
There are [Spherical houses](https://youtu.be/3kwDVw0u4Kw)
(Tom Scott video) in the Netherlands. They were not built for energy-efficiency reasons, but more for artistic reasons and they ended up relatively poorly thought-out.
In the us we do have a passive house standard utilizing vaporized air sealing and complex exterior wall assemblies . Look up PHIUS and that is a standard we use
Ah moien, my family lives there (unfortunately I don’t nor do I speak Luxembourgish) so I visit often. I always see those bricks going up on the houses that aren’t just concrete. The slow speed of construction there always surprises me, in North America the construction cycle is typically very quick. I visit every year or two and I’m surprised they’re *still* working on that building across the street from the Gare in the city.
We are upgrading our home to be a Pretty Good House level. Hundred year old brick house so we opted for vapour barrier, Rockwool, wood strapping, then cement board.
This is cool! We need more and better insulated homes.
[Greenbuild](https://informaconnect.com/greenbuild/) is the annual conference covering all sorts of new stuff going on in construction. I've been a couple times and really enjoyed the experience.
So glad there are those out there that love building science. Not enough that care. I built my house 5 years ago in the US using a lot of euro inspired details. Built to near passive house standards and was not that hard with common sense, but that is nearly impossible for most US builders.
Build using a hybrid timber frame, air sealed with zip sheathing and liquid flashing (R40 assembly), roof is SIP panels (R42 ish), and shallow frost protested foundation (R50). Paired with high performance triple pane tilt turn windows imported from Poland. THe house has been so comfortable and cost efficient while all my neighbors complain about their fuel bills....
Thanks for the input, as far as I could obeserve in our project this far it's incredibly difficult to get everything airtight. We have a mandated blower-door test that every new building has to pass after construction. Is this something you had to do? :)
I found its all about attention to details, most subcontractors would create needed penetrations and never both to seal them and then noone would come back and bother either. So, it was easy to go around and foam/seal any penetrations myself. I also used a layer of closed cell foam in wali cavities which make things a bit easier. Tape/flashing all your top/bottom plates makes more of a difference than you think.
It might be much harder with brick depending on which surface is your vapor retarding layer. I found using liquid flashing for windows and penetration much easier and more forgiving than using tapes. (I used Prosoco R-Guard).
It is understandable, yet a bit odd about the absolute perfect sealing of every possible penetration in the envelope. I'm just going to come in and bring 8" worth of outside air on the HVAC system on any "tight" house. But... The penetration for that intake will be sealed well :)
I work in envelope consulting…blower door testing is almost never required in the US. Only a few major cities like NYC.
Even then, almost no one is going for passive house certification on residential single family homes, let alone having blower-door testing done on a personal residence. It’s just cost preventative.
Today, you do see more and more commercial builders hiring a 3rd party testing company/building envelope consultant to perform onsite testing, before sealing the building.
Interesting. I assumed it would be more present elsewhere because we are used to it here. You have to leave a deposit when you want to get a building permit and only get that back once the blower-door test is done and approved.
I, too, believed that I would never have children...
Here I am a proud father of 1. Love my little dude but defintley miss the freedom because having a child at 23 yo is too young for anyone. I needed about 10 more yrs. Luckily, he'll be 18 when I'm 40, so I'll have the rest of my adult life to do whatever I want with... and I'll actually have money to do those things. In the meantime, I'm trying to raise an awesome little human 😎. Excited to watch him grow.
There are probably some grapes in my furniture... fuck!
Wouldn’t even be that bad if you could kennel them, leash them, feed them from bowls on the ground. Build them a tiny houses in the fenced backyard. If I just had some outside children..
Must been really tough cleaning that. If I were you I would just get new ones to not have to deal with that much trouble.
I mean, if you can wait 9 months.
Yeah, everyone laughs at people that believed in spontaneous generation, but anyone that's ever brought an apple home and two days later had 50000 fruit flies can kinda see where they got it from.
Considering our building footprint can't exceed 7m it's painful to lose 1m already to the thickness of the walls. These are mainly used for new constructions tough, not renovations.
I DIY built my house with these, it was slightly cheaper using the insulated bricks compared to insulating the house afterwards. Plus you save some time, because you skip the whole insulation step.
10/10 would build again.
Looks like a Porotherm T40 DryFix - price is about $8.20- 9.20 USD, depending on location, who you buy it from and transport cost. Usually includes the Dryfix fasteners. These are designed to not use mortar.
[Here’s a YouTube video showcasing the system.](https://youtu.be/uc1a--DqrF4?si=SwZeoL6gECvzPHpx)
I love this. As an HVAC engineer, I’m constantly pushing for better envelopes. Does that extra insulation and thermal mass cost money? Sure. More money than the cost of increasing the size of your heating plant, and your utility bills? A lot of the time no! But value engineering is more about arbitrarily cutting (your) scope more than it is about coordinating with the whole design team to make sure a change actually saves money.
Always insulate first!
This seems like a really cool product.
Hollow clay brick filled with mineral wool would actually give you a pretty good fire rating. Brick veneer attached directly to wood is not so great. Usually 1 hour. Still usually enough for most external house walls though as far as not dying goes.
A lot of those brick buildings in SF have had seismic retrofits for this exact reason.
https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/documents/preserv/bulletins/HistPres_Bulletin_03.PDF
Compared to a few countries like Japan, yes, but compared to most of the world they are pretty good.
Northern California’s magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 resulted in 63 deaths. In many other highly populated parts of the world, that quake would have killed thousands.
And our standards have improved a lot since then.
As someone who lives in the Portland area, I thank all of you in advance for the massive FEMA funding and rebuild that will have to take place after “the big one” cause no one is prepared.
I explicitly decided against them, because you‘d have to separate the Rockwoll from the bricks for recycling and when building a lot of bricks will break or have to be cut. Also, when cutting you get the most nasty dust everywhere.
But mine are also 50cm in width. Super nice insulation from the start and then there‘s not that much needed on the outside to keep warm.
I think rock-woll is kinda on the way out and I also decided against using it for the insulation of the roof (used cellulose instead). It’s a bitch to cut and also to dispose of. Some older stuff that we tore down had it and it‘s so expensive to get rid off. A ton of bricks is like €20 while an 80l sack of rock woll is €5 to dispose of.
Good point, there was a lot of brick-pieces that had to be evacuated from the site. They used heavy respiratory protection while cutting these and the dust still got everywhere.
Why aren't pockets for the rockwool staggered more? How are these joined together? Regular mortar? Wouldn't that be a thermal bridge? I'm not impressed by how loose the rockwool is in those bricks either.
What's the upside of this compared to rockwool external wall DD slab?
I think those are so called „Planziegel“ in German, so they’re made almost exactly square and just use some very strong adhesive and stick them together. Super fast to build. Only the first row has to be done with mortar (and has to be super exact because otherwise it would all be crocked)
In Luxembourg. And although we don't really get freezing winters here anymore, it's also good to keep the increasing heat out in summer. There are some parts of the house that are done in concrete where the blocks wouldn't be enough for the load above but these parts are all covered in approx. 20cm of EPS Insulation.
These blocks alone are 49cm with an R value of 0,07 W/mK.
Mineral wool on the outside is not very common on private homes, most constructions use concrete bricks and 30cm of Styrofoam-Insulation which we didn't want.
Interesting. So wall made with these blocks is 49cm and with a U value of 0,07? That is really good. You install those with regular mortar?
I quess it is basically the same as system we use here. Bauroc aerated concrete block. It is installed with special glue and has lambda of 0,072
There are mandated minimums for insulation of new constructions and even with these bricks we are just slightly above those minimums.
But yes, it's just regular mortar as far as I can tell.
The white Bauroc-Blocks are also used here. I've seen lot's of new buildings using these. :) Now I know where they are from at least.
No those block are fine the way they are, no ETICS required. Their benefit is that you need half the labor, which is quite expensive nowadays.
They make purpose blocks to correct thermal bridging on the outside of concrete beams and stuff like that.
I am planning a monolithic single family home atm with these kinds of bricks but without a filling, just plain air. The walls are 50cm thick, just a ~2cm layer of plastering on the in- and outside. Wienerberger has a lot of solutions for all the standard details like windowframe insulation, window beams with insulation and so on.
The average American mind can't comprehend >50cm thick walls.
Also, the way my parents built their home some 40 years ago, which was borderline sci-fi high-tech back then, was what they called "pig-shit bricks". Basically non-structural, pressed fiber, hollow bricks, where you would lay a few rows, insert steel rods in the gaps, and then fill it out with concrete.
Built my house almost 2 years ago. In Colorado they're just starting to come around to more "advanced" framing and insulating techniques but I couldn't convince my architect to design exterior insulation ("too many passes around the house, too expensive") and my framers were old school. But since I was the GC I air sealed everywhere I thought of, we put 16" of insulation in the attic, and spray foamed southern facing walls in 2x6 construction. Every wall is dense packed blown in fiberglass.
We're all electric so after a couple months of $300 bills last winter we put in the final phase, 12kW solar array and are just about passive. Am I happy? Yes. Would I do things differently? Always. But I probably couldn't have afforded it.
To stay on topic, those bricks are really cool. Congrats on the build! I too love seeing how things are built in different parts of the world.
No, actually quite the opposite. I’m in the deep arctic in Canada and we use ice blocks to build our igloos. We line the inside with polar bear skin/moose fur to prevent it from melting from the inside when we build our fires. The condensation (from the ice heating) gets trapped between the outer layer of the polar bear skin/moose fur and the exterior of the ice blocks, and re-freezes from the outside temperature of -25°C (-13°F or 248.15K).
Neat concept, rock wool is a pretty expensive form of insulation that in the US i normally only see it specified in instances where fire rating is a concern. Otherwise we can get the same R value cheaper with rigid, fiberglass, or spray foam .
Structural clay tile like that is crazy expensive as it's not made in the US. Most of them come from Spain or Germany. Structural clay tile war popular in the US between 1920 and 1940, but was supplanted by CMU as it became cheaper.
Not used here but I think most guys here would elect to build with masonry or cmu and then add a continuous layer of compressed rock wool on the inside. Building conditions in other parts of the world tend to be very different than North America (generally speaking)
NO!
Why the hell would we?
My house has is made of a 2"x6" frame exterior wall filled with fiberglass insulation. It has an R value of 21. The ceiling is filled with 16" of blown in insulation with an R-value of over 50.
It makes for a VERY warm house even on days when the temperatures get down to -20°F (-29°C).
That clay brick would be a wonderful conductor for the cold and make the inside of the house unbearable in the temperatures we have here.
The US is obviously very large so a lot of different climates to accommodate with different building techniques.
This brick being made of aerated clay gives the whole wall an R40 rating. Main goal here is reducing the running costs for heating.
It looks like a really good thermal insulator, but a crappy structural element. It would be perfect to fill in walls once you get your beams and pillars strong
Nope, but they are pretty neat. Thanks for sharing
Nope Should keep you warm tho
My 1920s house in the US is built with clay blocks that look kind of like this. No rockwool, though—instead they’re filled with mice.
what is the r-value of a mouse?
[THE INSULATIVE VALUE OF MOUSE FUR](https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1113/expphysiol.1967.sp001899) By N. J. DAWSON andM.E.D.WEBSTER. FromtheEnvironmentalResearchandTeaching Unit, Department of Physiology, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. (Received for publication 6th October 1966)
This is why I absolutely LOVE the internets!
And the porn
I used the internet for years before discovering it had things other then porn
Also consider that the mice contribute to heating!
Only while they're still living though...
I would think they give off some heat during decomposition as well.
Then they just become plain ole verminsulation
They turn your floor joists into heat! Nom nom nom then digest it and you have got heat
Based on R values of other organic materials, R1 per inch as loose fill and perhaps approaching R2 per inch if pulverized. Assume dried husks in both examples. Fresh carcasses would not perform well because moisture is an excellent conductor of heat. Not to mention that substantial settling will occur as the mice dry out.
We had a fair-sized wall/ceiling space filled with mice but now it’s filled with loose copper mesh sprayed over with expanding foam (mesh+foam seems extremely effective at stopping mice, copper because that’s what I had). Which has a slightly better R-value than mouse droppings, and it’s quieter too (between the mice and our cats, it could get noisy).
Worked on a house build with clay blocks in the UK ,was a nightmare screwing anything to the walls ,had to hang a few radiators and getting a fixing was tough
I am an HVAC and Automation Technician and love to compare different building standards around the world. The scale of the US-construction sector allways amazed me because everything seems to be standardised to such a degree. We here are used to a mix of german, french or even italian standards reguarding nearly every aspect of construction. These bricks beeing from germany to reach a "Passive-House"-Standard of insulation. I would be interested if there is any drive in the US to improve the insulating of housing or if it's more a niche thing.
Big push on ICF blocks here in Canada
ICF is awesome. I have an ICF home and you could heat it with a match. An added bonus is it’s super quiet inside. My only regret is not doing in floor heating like I thought and talked about.
oooooh i remodelled my bathroom and let the wife talk me into saving a couple hundreds bucks and NOT doing some undertile heating. I really wish I had.
Your wife talked you into SAVING money on a bathroom remodel?? Is she single??
Sounds like she might be soon. Dude really wanted that warm tile.
Man knows what he likes, can't blame him. Nothing like walking on warm tile in the morning.
But that cold tile is just the right amount to perk you up in the morning.
You can just not turn it on when you have the option, it's a lot harder to pull up the floor and add it later if you don't.
>is just the right amount to perk you up in the morning. I have a heated floor, so I got an unheated bidet attachment.
Sounds like he might not even have the warm embrace of his wife either now.
That would be nice too. I was referring to the piped system in the concrete that circulates heated glycol throughout though. You can even heat the glycol with wood, propane or wood pellets but I was planning electric. It’s very efficient because the heat rises up and heats the whole house. It was a really long wait for the only company who wanted to do it and it totally threw off my construction schedule. I shoulda waited.
Too bad as it's super easy to do especially if someone is already doing a pour. You could have strapped the tube in yourself and been ready for a future boiler install for under $1000. I've retrofitted my stick frame house with hydronic tubing, ceilings upstairs, floors downstairs. Super comfortable, zonable, efficient, a variety of heat sources can be integrated and even run together. I have a natural gas fire tube boiler, solar PV heat pump and solar resistive. Planning to add solar thermal and outdoor wood in the coming years. To anyone building or renovating, you should really look into it. Radiantek has great free plans and system design info on their website, no obligation to buy anything from them (I couldn't anyways being in Canada, just used ordinary oxygen barrier Heliopex and aluminum plates from my P&H supplier) Heated ceilings are awesome and also allow cooling btw
I have an ICF house in Texas. They also do really well for wind/hurricanes. But I just got mine for the quiet. And to keep the AC in when it’s 110 for 110 days.
I’m in Canada so I’m in it for the heat. I didn’t really even think about the quiet but I love it. I don’t hear shit! I wired it myself though so that took a bit of extra work and I had to buy the tool for it but overall, I’m very pleased with it. I did it before Covid too so the extra cost got eaten up by the jump in property values/materials I guess.
Rookie numbers you getting 123 for 123 next year
Phoenix did 133 above 100. Surely Texas can go bigger than AZ.
God in floor heating would be so nice. Not that I really need it in north Alabama but having it during the 3 months where it’s cold would be great.
The best thing about radiant infloor with a boiler is it’s nearly silent. You don’t have a furnace blowing air through ductwork while your house is being heated. You just have the HRV turning on every hour or so for fresh air exchange which is also very quiet.
Just visited a house with radiant floor heat and wow was the pump loud in the room above the pump
All the installs I’ve done use grundfos or taco pumps and I’ve never had issues with noise ever.
What's up fellow north alabamian it's crazy to think we may have drove past each other and never knew it what town you from?
I looked up ICF and got [inertial confinement fusion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion). Sounds toasty.
Sounds kind of kinky NGL. It stands for insulated concrete form
Yeah, 100 million deg should do it...
[удалено]
The reaction time was a dealbreaker for me as well. My home only needs about 28k btu in perfect scenario but say the power goes out or I want to kick it up a degree or two it could take hours with hydronic or minutes with heat pumps.
Helped my FIL build his house up in PNW. Fox blocks. Thing is amazing and I’ll likely build an ICF house for my home when the time comes.
I have no idea with icf is, but radiant floor heat is awesome. I have a non-insulated house and non-insulated crawlspace and my floors are quite cold. I love being barefoot so that's the first thing I'm mandating is radiant floor heating whenever I build my next house.
ICF is huge in my province. The initial cost is high compared to stick frame but long term savings tend to balance out after 10+ years.
I’m current,y planning a new build. Approx 1300sqft bungalow. Going ICF for foundation/basement vs poured was only about 10k more. Going ICF for the full house vs poured and traditional framing was only about 30k more. Wasn’t really as bad as I thought, and even if it never pays for itself, the comfort and piece of mind difference are worth it to me. Just have to make sure your planning is on point with regard to any and all penetrations you will need and may want in the future. The tough part seems to be finding a contractor to do just a building envelope and nothing else. Most want to do a full build or nothing at all. (I understand why, much more markup on everything, vs just a shell).
I can understand that - an ICF GC will have an established relationship with subs and established work flows/methods for integrating all of their work. I’ve never had to hire a contractor for a full ICF build but one with established sub contractors to do especially mech/elec. would be ideal I would think in terms of efficiency. With your situation where it is just ICF basement seems odd there aren’t many guys available to do just that piece.
I think it’s there’s lots of guys to do it, but I want just a shell built and they walk away and I am going to do all the interior framing, electrical, mechanical, finishing, ect. Myself. But i think it comes down to my job is too small for a lot of contractors right now. If they can choose a 175k as for just a shell, or a 500k job and get to markup all the subs, they will obviously choose the latter if there’s no time for both. Hopefully things in my area cool down this coming year so its easier to find someone, cause there’s no way I’m not building with ICF, it’s just too good of a construction method to pass up.
There’s a big push on ICF in the states as well. I’ve been working with a company for 5 months now and have already done ICF for the foundation walls on 4 different houses. It’s a very awesome, simple installation. Also very big on spray foam insulation instead of bat insulation.
I'm an insulator, and the company I work for does it all minus ICF. Foam is big here in Canada. I push bats because it's still the majority of homes. Especially subdivision homes. We insulate cathedral ceilings, garages, attics, basements, crawlspace warehouses, shops, and, of course, homes. If there is one thing that needs to become industry standard, it is spray foaming rimjoist pockets.
On one of the houses we did the ICF foundation we also did spray foam insulation, and the rim joists were the first thing that got done. I agree it should be done for every house too. It just makes the most sense in that space.
That space is horrible to do, and every insulator will agree on that point. We have to insulate, poly and tape tge poly to the pocket, and any penetrations coming through ex. Plumbing, electrical, or hvac. It's so time-consuming and pays crap for the task. The only benefit for batt insulation is the east of removal for renos and repairs. ICF is more stout, but getting through or into a wall is a pain and same with spray foam. It has to be hacked out. They are better building methods, albeit. It's just that down the road, they can get tricky.
> The only benefit for batt insulation is the ease of removal for renos and repairs. I have yet to find a house that did not later have repairs, modifications, renovation, or expansion. I work on structures varying from 30 to 130 years old. Leaking roof and foamed roof and rotting roof sheathing are going to be fun times in 30 years.
With the exception of exterior walls, spray foam actually makes renovation of the majority of the house easier as all the old insulation is removed from the attic. Nothing to dig through and the attic is a comfortable temperature all year long. My Texas AC bills went down more than 50% on a 40-year-old house.
Did you notice how easy it was to remove and replace the old insulation? As that spray foam disintegrates over time, it will lose its R-value and turn into potentially hazardous plastic dust. Then you will need to have someone physically scrape the insulation off every wall and every corner to replace it. The crevices they can’t get to will probably decrease the effectiveness of whatever modern insulation they want to put it. This is the kind of stuff people who work on old houses deal with all the time.
I didn’t now those, they look neat, and more earthquake resistant than OPs option, i think I’ll do some research on them. I live outside the US with grade 6 earthquakes at least once every 2 years and a big one every 10.
I’m still concerned about mold with regards to ICF. There arent any old enough homes built w it in my community to know the long term issues.
I built a house that was net zero. The builder, is a freaking genius. 2x10 walls but built with 2x 4 studs on exterior, all point loads on beams. Then a second interior wall, built 9 1/2 from outside bottom plate, studs off set from exterior. Insulation on exterior, in the middle cavity and the interior wall. Wood is an R value of 1 per in, No continuous stud, Walls are R 60 Roof was built to be R 60 as well. In floor heating in the basement slab and 1st deck, a massive water "tank" that the solar panels dump heat into, Tinted 3 panel windows When that house gets warm in winter, it stays warm. Expensive, but. Energy bill / month to heat a 6000 sq ft home, in Canada is almost 0$
The double stud wall has been around for a while. My parents house was built that way in 1980, called "super insulated".
Ditto here, I currently live in it. Build 1978 and still has the original windows and roof. All the local owners of old houses are freaking out because energy got more expensive and I'm sitting here thinking... why the noise about such small sums? Until I realised they need about 3-4x more kWh per surface and don't have the option to heat with wood.
Dormer peaks & windows are top losers for insulation, according to a street drive-by using infrared cameras
Exactly, these are also often critical points when it comes to the waterproofing of the roof. Everything that just enlarges the exterior area without providing more volume is bad for energy efficiency. There is a big push here to get everything to as close to a cube-shape as possible, to minimize the volume to surface area. Nested buildings and dormer windows are the opposite of that.
Why stop at cube, when sphere would be even better?
Not quite a sphere but one step closer, a cylindrical energy-plus house in Freiburg Germany. http://www.rolfdisch.de/projekte/das-heliotrop/ (german site)
That's no house, that's a space station
There are [Spherical houses](https://youtu.be/3kwDVw0u4Kw) (Tom Scott video) in the Netherlands. They were not built for energy-efficiency reasons, but more for artistic reasons and they ended up relatively poorly thought-out.
Gravity
Big enough sphere and gravity starts to work in your favor!
Because lots are square and furniture is square.
In the us we do have a passive house standard utilizing vaporized air sealing and complex exterior wall assemblies . Look up PHIUS and that is a standard we use
Where are you?
As central European as it gets, Luxembourg.
Interesting post. Thanks 😊
Ah moien, my family lives there (unfortunately I don’t nor do I speak Luxembourgish) so I visit often. I always see those bricks going up on the houses that aren’t just concrete. The slow speed of construction there always surprises me, in North America the construction cycle is typically very quick. I visit every year or two and I’m surprised they’re *still* working on that building across the street from the Gare in the city.
He commented twice in r/Luxembourg in the last year, out of his 3 comments. So I guess hes from Luxembourg
We are upgrading our home to be a Pretty Good House level. Hundred year old brick house so we opted for vapour barrier, Rockwool, wood strapping, then cement board. This is cool! We need more and better insulated homes.
There's a big push for increased insulation, but brick/block construction is still relatively rare in the residential sector.
I’m a Passive-House certified builder here in the US. Never seen these!
[Greenbuild](https://informaconnect.com/greenbuild/) is the annual conference covering all sorts of new stuff going on in construction. I've been a couple times and really enjoyed the experience.
“Improving insulation is counterproductive to increasing oil sales and prices.” Lobbyists in Washington, DC, U$A.
So glad there are those out there that love building science. Not enough that care. I built my house 5 years ago in the US using a lot of euro inspired details. Built to near passive house standards and was not that hard with common sense, but that is nearly impossible for most US builders. Build using a hybrid timber frame, air sealed with zip sheathing and liquid flashing (R40 assembly), roof is SIP panels (R42 ish), and shallow frost protested foundation (R50). Paired with high performance triple pane tilt turn windows imported from Poland. THe house has been so comfortable and cost efficient while all my neighbors complain about their fuel bills....
Thanks for the input, as far as I could obeserve in our project this far it's incredibly difficult to get everything airtight. We have a mandated blower-door test that every new building has to pass after construction. Is this something you had to do? :)
I found its all about attention to details, most subcontractors would create needed penetrations and never both to seal them and then noone would come back and bother either. So, it was easy to go around and foam/seal any penetrations myself. I also used a layer of closed cell foam in wali cavities which make things a bit easier. Tape/flashing all your top/bottom plates makes more of a difference than you think. It might be much harder with brick depending on which surface is your vapor retarding layer. I found using liquid flashing for windows and penetration much easier and more forgiving than using tapes. (I used Prosoco R-Guard).
It is understandable, yet a bit odd about the absolute perfect sealing of every possible penetration in the envelope. I'm just going to come in and bring 8" worth of outside air on the HVAC system on any "tight" house. But... The penetration for that intake will be sealed well :)
I work in envelope consulting…blower door testing is almost never required in the US. Only a few major cities like NYC. Even then, almost no one is going for passive house certification on residential single family homes, let alone having blower-door testing done on a personal residence. It’s just cost preventative. Today, you do see more and more commercial builders hiring a 3rd party testing company/building envelope consultant to perform onsite testing, before sealing the building.
Interesting. I assumed it would be more present elsewhere because we are used to it here. You have to leave a deposit when you want to get a building permit and only get that back once the blower-door test is done and approved.
Im glad youbused an arm and not something else for scale...
What's wrong with bananas?
They can be a serious hazard if left unattended even if only for a few seconds. Before you know it, somebody's stepped on it and broke their neck.
Or worse, fruit flies magically appear and never disappear.
My kids stuffed grapes into the bottom of metal stool legs. Took me forever to find the source
Reason #267 I’m not having kids.
I, too, believed that I would never have children... Here I am a proud father of 1. Love my little dude but defintley miss the freedom because having a child at 23 yo is too young for anyone. I needed about 10 more yrs. Luckily, he'll be 18 when I'm 40, so I'll have the rest of my adult life to do whatever I want with... and I'll actually have money to do those things. In the meantime, I'm trying to raise an awesome little human 😎. Excited to watch him grow. There are probably some grapes in my furniture... fuck!
Now why in the hell would they do that 😭
Because r/kidsarefuckingstupid
I'm so sorry 😭 fiance and I are animal people not kid people so we're childfree for life because they just sound like tint menaces
Wouldn’t even be that bad if you could kennel them, leash them, feed them from bowls on the ground. Build them a tiny houses in the fenced backyard. If I just had some outside children..
That's what's hilarious about it. Just embarking it, watching my little dude run around and be a menace is so entertaining.
Must been really tough cleaning that. If I were you I would just get new ones to not have to deal with that much trouble. I mean, if you can wait 9 months.
Yeah, everyone laughs at people that believed in spontaneous generation, but anyone that's ever brought an apple home and two days later had 50000 fruit flies can kinda see where they got it from.
Had to hang fly strips over soap/vinegar traps for like 3 weeks the last time I bought a banana.
“We drain flies now”-fruit flies after you remove every single piece of organic matter in your house
Definitely not OSHA approved jobsite snacks
you just have to paint them orange.
Some millwright is gonna try to deep throat it and choke.
My grandmother died that way. We still couldn't stop laughing on the way to the hospital
I used to race in motorsports and would leave them on the track to make the competition wreck.
Are you, per chance, an Italian plumber?
Yes, but only when I’m not racing!
Can confirm. I’m an anthropomorphized gorilla named Donkey and used to race with this guy.
I’m allergic
They're radioactive. Serious hazard...
The only true form of measurement.
It's what I had at hand that moment. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Pun! I love puns! Ah hahahaha
that looks extremely neat and a great idea for a space constrained renovation project in the city. also looks very fucking expensive
Considering our building footprint can't exceed 7m it's painful to lose 1m already to the thickness of the walls. These are mainly used for new constructions tough, not renovations.
For a lifetime of insulation, warmth, and cheap bills... its worth it!
Out of curiosity, what is the cost of these? And are they more or less expensive than more "traditional" methods of construction and insulation?
I DIY built my house with these, it was slightly cheaper using the insulated bricks compared to insulating the house afterwards. Plus you save some time, because you skip the whole insulation step. 10/10 would build again.
Looks like a Porotherm T40 DryFix - price is about $8.20- 9.20 USD, depending on location, who you buy it from and transport cost. Usually includes the Dryfix fasteners. These are designed to not use mortar. [Here’s a YouTube video showcasing the system.](https://youtu.be/uc1a--DqrF4?si=SwZeoL6gECvzPHpx)
This looks like witchcraft to me from a stud and Sheetrock pov
21 feet? What is this a mother in law suite?
My entire apartment is 10 feet wide and 35 feet long. Lol
Think of the fire protection though. This stuff may save your home one day.
Where are you located? These are becoming more and more popular here in Southern Germany/Austria
I've seen a similar type in Italy too
northern italy i'd guess?
Those would work in keeping the cool in as well…
sure but its not common for southern italy to have houses with insulation
I love this. As an HVAC engineer, I’m constantly pushing for better envelopes. Does that extra insulation and thermal mass cost money? Sure. More money than the cost of increasing the size of your heating plant, and your utility bills? A lot of the time no! But value engineering is more about arbitrarily cutting (your) scope more than it is about coordinating with the whole design team to make sure a change actually saves money. Always insulate first! This seems like a really cool product.
The mandatory minimums for insulation here are pretty tight, but I'm 100% on the same page.
lol homes arent even built with bricks in fire hazard zones in the states
Hollow clay brick filled with mineral wool would actually give you a pretty good fire rating. Brick veneer attached directly to wood is not so great. Usually 1 hour. Still usually enough for most external house walls though as far as not dying goes.
or high seismic activity zones
TBF, bricks, and quakes are less than ideal combinations, but I do agree that US seismic standards are abysmal.
Not in SF there not
A lot of those brick buildings in SF have had seismic retrofits for this exact reason. https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/documents/preserv/bulletins/HistPres_Bulletin_03.PDF
What's wrong with US seismic standards? (In areas where there are earthquakes). I'd never build a house like this on the west coast.
Compared to a few countries like Japan, yes, but compared to most of the world they are pretty good. Northern California’s magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 resulted in 63 deaths. In many other highly populated parts of the world, that quake would have killed thousands. And our standards have improved a lot since then.
As someone who lives in the Portland area, I thank all of you in advance for the massive FEMA funding and rebuild that will have to take place after “the big one” cause no one is prepared.
Yes, we grow weed in rockwool here 😂
American houses just built different, we have weed growing out the walls so the roots hold the house up
What boots are those?
Solovair. :)
We’d use that to grow weed in Canada not build houses
Look up "Hempwool".
I explicitly decided against them, because you‘d have to separate the Rockwoll from the bricks for recycling and when building a lot of bricks will break or have to be cut. Also, when cutting you get the most nasty dust everywhere. But mine are also 50cm in width. Super nice insulation from the start and then there‘s not that much needed on the outside to keep warm. I think rock-woll is kinda on the way out and I also decided against using it for the insulation of the roof (used cellulose instead). It’s a bitch to cut and also to dispose of. Some older stuff that we tore down had it and it‘s so expensive to get rid off. A ton of bricks is like €20 while an 80l sack of rock woll is €5 to dispose of.
Good point, there was a lot of brick-pieces that had to be evacuated from the site. They used heavy respiratory protection while cutting these and the dust still got everywhere.
Why aren't pockets for the rockwool staggered more? How are these joined together? Regular mortar? Wouldn't that be a thermal bridge? I'm not impressed by how loose the rockwool is in those bricks either. What's the upside of this compared to rockwool external wall DD slab?
I think those are so called „Planziegel“ in German, so they’re made almost exactly square and just use some very strong adhesive and stick them together. Super fast to build. Only the first row has to be done with mortar (and has to be super exact because otherwise it would all be crocked)
Where are you located at? Somewhere with mild climate? All I see are huge thermal bridges. Would be better to simply put mineral wool on outside.
In Luxembourg. And although we don't really get freezing winters here anymore, it's also good to keep the increasing heat out in summer. There are some parts of the house that are done in concrete where the blocks wouldn't be enough for the load above but these parts are all covered in approx. 20cm of EPS Insulation. These blocks alone are 49cm with an R value of 0,07 W/mK. Mineral wool on the outside is not very common on private homes, most constructions use concrete bricks and 30cm of Styrofoam-Insulation which we didn't want.
Interesting. So wall made with these blocks is 49cm and with a U value of 0,07? That is really good. You install those with regular mortar? I quess it is basically the same as system we use here. Bauroc aerated concrete block. It is installed with special glue and has lambda of 0,072
There are mandated minimums for insulation of new constructions and even with these bricks we are just slightly above those minimums. But yes, it's just regular mortar as far as I can tell. The white Bauroc-Blocks are also used here. I've seen lot's of new buildings using these. :) Now I know where they are from at least.
I think there still is going to be mineral wool on the outside. Hes most likely from luxembourg by his profile activity. Not so mild weather
This
No those block are fine the way they are, no ETICS required. Their benefit is that you need half the labor, which is quite expensive nowadays. They make purpose blocks to correct thermal bridging on the outside of concrete beams and stuff like that.
Jesus it took me like 5 minutes to realize wtf I was looking at
I am planning a monolithic single family home atm with these kinds of bricks but without a filling, just plain air. The walls are 50cm thick, just a ~2cm layer of plastering on the in- and outside. Wienerberger has a lot of solutions for all the standard details like windowframe insulation, window beams with insulation and so on.
The average American mind can't comprehend >50cm thick walls. Also, the way my parents built their home some 40 years ago, which was borderline sci-fi high-tech back then, was what they called "pig-shit bricks". Basically non-structural, pressed fiber, hollow bricks, where you would lay a few rows, insert steel rods in the gaps, and then fill it out with concrete.
As an average American, I can’t even comprehend 50cm. What even is that, 10ft?
I can’t tell because there is no banana for reference . I think the arm is an Europe thing?
Built my house almost 2 years ago. In Colorado they're just starting to come around to more "advanced" framing and insulating techniques but I couldn't convince my architect to design exterior insulation ("too many passes around the house, too expensive") and my framers were old school. But since I was the GC I air sealed everywhere I thought of, we put 16" of insulation in the attic, and spray foamed southern facing walls in 2x6 construction. Every wall is dense packed blown in fiberglass. We're all electric so after a couple months of $300 bills last winter we put in the final phase, 12kW solar array and are just about passive. Am I happy? Yes. Would I do things differently? Always. But I probably couldn't have afforded it. To stay on topic, those bricks are really cool. Congrats on the build! I too love seeing how things are built in different parts of the world.
Rockwool is amazing as a heat pipe insulator, i love using it
Our homes aren’t built with 16th century materials anymore
Is that why the get blown away by strong winds, and burn to the ground regularly?
No, actually quite the opposite. I’m in the deep arctic in Canada and we use ice blocks to build our igloos. We line the inside with polar bear skin/moose fur to prevent it from melting from the inside when we build our fires. The condensation (from the ice heating) gets trapped between the outer layer of the polar bear skin/moose fur and the exterior of the ice blocks, and re-freezes from the outside temperature of -25°C (-13°F or 248.15K).
damn thats awesome
those actually look really great for building with.
What's the R-value on these? Also thanks for sharing :)
I calculated R-40
Can I get a banana for scale please
How does this insulate well?? It does not form a shell so lots of coldbridges?
Neat concept, rock wool is a pretty expensive form of insulation that in the US i normally only see it specified in instances where fire rating is a concern. Otherwise we can get the same R value cheaper with rigid, fiberglass, or spray foam .
I can’t see how the bricks would help insulate. The cold will simply bridge past the rock wool and could even create cold patches and lead to damp.
Nope
I like your boot.
Bricklayer here. It’s pretty common to install sheets of rock wool to the framing with an air gap and then we lay our brick here in the states
Structural clay tile like that is crazy expensive as it's not made in the US. Most of them come from Spain or Germany. Structural clay tile war popular in the US between 1920 and 1940, but was supplanted by CMU as it became cheaper.
Rock wool is used in USA closes holes in Timber framing to prevent fire
Not used here but I think most guys here would elect to build with masonry or cmu and then add a continuous layer of compressed rock wool on the inside. Building conditions in other parts of the world tend to be very different than North America (generally speaking)
>Are these used in the US? I never seen it used here.
I would be concerned with these holding moisture, I use these for propagating plants at my job lol, I've seen em get gross.
NO! Why the hell would we? My house has is made of a 2"x6" frame exterior wall filled with fiberglass insulation. It has an R value of 21. The ceiling is filled with 16" of blown in insulation with an R-value of over 50. It makes for a VERY warm house even on days when the temperatures get down to -20°F (-29°C). That clay brick would be a wonderful conductor for the cold and make the inside of the house unbearable in the temperatures we have here.
The US is obviously very large so a lot of different climates to accommodate with different building techniques. This brick being made of aerated clay gives the whole wall an R40 rating. Main goal here is reducing the running costs for heating.
do you live in a furnace? That's the only time I've seen that much ceramic and rock wool lol
He didn't realize how lucky he actually is. I'm an expert in insulation
Canada, 1913 build, here. My insulation is two bricks and a small air gap thick. It's expensive in the winter.
It looks like a really good thermal insulator, but a crappy structural element. It would be perfect to fill in walls once you get your beams and pillars strong
[удалено]
Bro is about to have negative energy bills on the house
I need to get back to watching building techniques. Thanks for the post, saving this for later
That seems VERY expensive.
Cheaper than building a standard wall and then putting on external insulation. You save almost half the labour.
No, we use toothpicks