Has anybody ever used The Foothold product? It's from ICF Building Co. in Connecticut. Looks like a great and easy way to get your footings set up to pour.

Looks interesting. AT PolycreteUSA, we can make our Big Block ICF forms 12", 18" or 24" tall and up to 24" wide. These are perfect for forming footings. Matter of fact, just this week, a customer ordered 16" wide forms for doing a footing and discovered he should have ordered 20". It's no problem, we FedExed him 240 20" cross ties and he swapped them out for the 16's. It's actually a lot easier than you might think.

Looks like a lot of extra cost for nothing. Using a 2x8 footing form is still the most economical option that I have found. The footing they show in the video on their website is the simplest design (garage with 4 corners). If you are trying this product with a complex foundation (say 20 corners with step-footings), I would be very surprised if you could square it up properly. I would prefer a footing that is poured first and carefully leveled. You can then mark your building lines to be perfectly square (if footings are formed 1-2 inches wider than needed, you don't need them perfectly square, but should be close).

EPS/XPS foam could be added before backfill if needed for frost protection. You may want to eliminate the foam from the inside of the footing to allow heat loss to the footing if the interior is heated.

The only thing this product seems to save in my mind is a little sledge hammer work, but the exercise does me good. Also eliminates one pour, but unless it is a very simple foundation, I would prefer a separate footing pour for the reasons listed above.

I posted this about a week ago, that I only pour mono pours when it's my job. Don't do as many as I used to since the old body is getting creaky, but I do sell the system to my customers and guide them on the pour. It became apparent that using the light weight of the forms was an advantage over traditional systems. We did a frost wall job with 62 offset corners on 1128 lin ft of 4' forms on a 24"x10" footing. We put the footing forms in their relative locations, making sure that the were level. Then after stacking the forms we had a survey company set the corners on each unit. It was a simple thing to push the walls where needed since the cross ties that I use allow the walls to repositioned and then pin them in place. On this job it would have been impossible to do it any other way since the excavator dug trenches for the footings and left the dirt in the center of each foundation. We poured the footings and walls in about 6.5 hours including moving the pump once since a 90 meter pump was too short to hit each outside corner. Your vertical rebar are put in one piece before the pour saving time with dowels and how many times have you gone on a job and the dowels have to cut or bent because the footing guy put them in the wrong spot. What about the times the dowels are laid out wrong and they hit the webs of the blocks. Unless your a neat freak, you don't screed the tops of the footings or finish them. It's been so long since I pour walls any other way it seems like a no brainer, all pluses and no minuses. If you save time on a job it's a big winner. Oh and another point to consider. Since this cold weather started early in upstate NY my customers were able to able to pour their footings walls then back fill before the floor was poured. With the footings and walls being one piece, no problem. Each person has to make their own decisions on how to operate their jobs, I know from what I've experienced, mono pour is the only way for me. This spring I'm going to do something that I've been playing around with for several years. Pouring the footing, frost wall and slab in one step. Hopefully I'll remember to take pictures