Posted By mojoe on 18 Apr 2016 08:44 PM
 

nothing to see here folks ……… just move along - move along. - and don't ask any questions…We'll tell you what you need to know after you sign on the dotted line. What about my quote? If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it. I love how the people who have never done an honest day's work in their life are the ones pretending to be the expert on "the reality of the world" - cracks me up every time.

What on earth are you taking about?

I don't know you and you don't know me. You just signed onto this forum a few days ago with 30 posts to date. I don't understand your need to make personal attacks. "...never done an honest days work in their life..."  Excuse me?

Stick to discussing and not making personal attacks.

I think if I was choosing a builder, I would want to see his previous work and talk to previous customers. Anyone can be anyone on the internet. Let their work do the talking. Customers who live in ICF homes are happy to talk about their homes and their decisions. No GC should ever be too busy to meet with a potential customer. There is always time.

It was no personal attack - just an observation and likely an accurate on at that. Your posts show how limited your actual knowledge about building is like :

"Raw concrete walls on the interior residential makes it very difficult for the residential trades. Raw concrete walls are a commercial product, plain and simple. One would have to hire commercial trades to do the work. The cost and complexity would blow most people out of the water. The use of tap-cons is more commercial driven than residential.
That's the problem with raw concrete on the interior or exterior. The residential trades would be clueless on how to finish off and then the costs and complexity to hire commercial tradesmen would make the costs insurmountable."

Any residential home built on a poured concrete foundation with a basement has bare concrete walls that are often finished in a variety of ways to make additional living space. It is done by the same residential trades that do the rest of the house and they are neither "clueless" nor even slowed down by the process. You are the one who is "clueless".

Your useless platitudes like: "Plus one would have to have 5"+ of exterior foam to make up for the R-Value loss." and: "As far "dreams" go when it comes to house building. It always comes back to the reality of what one can afford" are especially insightful. Who could have possibly imagined that removing the interior insulation would require additional exterior insulation in order to compensate? - or that one's dreams are limited by their budget? Are those are the kind of revelations that you think people look to the experts here to provide? Apparently so.

Why no talk of prices? or how many companies discount their products by 50% to contractors or "dealers". Is that to cover all that "free" advice?

Posted By mojoe on 19 Apr 2016 02:45 PM

Any residential home built on a poured concrete foundation with a basement has bare concrete walls that are often finished in a variety of ways to make additional living space.

Why no talk of prices? or how many companies discount their products by 50% to contractors or "dealers". Is that to cover all that "free" advice?

I will make one last reply to you and then put you on IGNORE since you are childish and you responded once again to making personal attacks. You have 30 posts under your belt and are acting like you are the "expert" but your posts clearly show you are anything but that, you have made it clear that you are just a bully and sadly a forum troll.

95% of basements in new homes are UNFINISHED basements. Rarely will a contractor finish off a basement. Typically it will be raw concrete walls or insulation behind a wrap holding it back. A far cry from having it ready to be finished off. It would require a lot of labor to frame out the walls, running electrical and plumbing in the walls, insulating the walls, etc.

Most basements look like this:



I am not a contractor so I am not discussing "pricing". If you want price quotes call or contact a contractor for your immediate area. If you want average costs then according to recent articles the price of ICF is around $15 per wall square foot area. That includes the ICF forms, rebar, 6" of concrete and labor or the complete  finished product. That's the average but it some areas it could be more or less.

Lbear - I appreciate the research, I wasn't able to find that number when I was originally looking.  When I priced out materials individually, though, my number came in about 30% lower than that on BB, so it looks like I was doing a decent job on that part, which is reassuring!  I hesitate to ask for pricing in here unless I've not been able to find any way to do a direct materials estimate or get some national/regional averages - I imagine people ask for pricing and aren't considering that getting any number other than national or regional averages would be really difficult without a lot of project-specific information and time investment.  I've been able to find national and regional averages for most things, and pricing for direct purchase items for others.  The items that I haven't been able to do that with, like metal SIP roofing panels, I called manufacturers directly to get ballpark figures.  I have a couple of holes left in my estimates, but what I've done at this point is to add 30% to material costs in the number for labor until I can get direct quotes, since I don't want to bother area contractors until I'm honed down quite a bit from the "wow that's cool" phase to "that appears doable from research so far". 

I do hope that in addition to interviewing home owners, that the time you all spend on here helping people like me leads potential customers your way!  I'm sorry about the conflict in this thread, and I appreciate you staying and helping me anyway.  I hope that good karma comes back to you!

Please do use the ignore feature. As I have already pointed out, your insightful revelations were basically useless - even to the neophyte DIY OP. If you aren't a contractor, what are you? Industry shill? I guess I was correct in my previous assertion. You can call me all the names you want, that doesn't change anything. If a contractor doesn't finish off a basement it is likely because the buyer doesn't want to add the additional costs to the price of the house - not because the trades don't have a clue as to how to go about the job. Strapping the walls with 2x lumber and tap cons would allow the walls to be finished like any other wall if one decided they didn't want the benefits afforded by the exposed thermal mass - hardly an insurmountable obstacle.

maria, karma is karma and by it's very definition one reaps what one sows so one can tell how one is doing by what's coming to them at any given time. If someone is being called on their position, is that not karma coming around? - or are they just an innocent victim and there is no such thing as karma? Look what it took to get even a semblance of a price from this industry mouthpiece. Did he offer any help when you said no one would give you so much as a quote? and what research? Do you think he isn't paid for his service here? How much building do you think he has ever done? Since you aren't a builder maybe you can't tell but it's easy for anyone who has real experience to see. Feel free to take your advice from him, though, in fact, I insist. If you can't tell the difference between someone who is trying to help you and someone who is trying to hose you, you must need some more hosing. You'll figure it out eventually.

Posted By mariaD on 19 Apr 2016 06:54 PM
Lbear - I appreciate the research, I wasn't able to find that number when I was originally looking.  When I priced out materials individually, though, my number came in about 30% lower than that on BB, so it looks like I was doing a decent job on that part, which is reassuring!  I hesitate to ask for pricing in here unless I've not been able to find any way to do a direct materials estimate or get some national/regional averages - I imagine people ask for pricing and aren't considering that getting any number other than national or regional averages would be really difficult without a lot of project-specific information and time investment.  I've been able to find national and regional averages for most things, and pricing for direct purchase items for others. 

 No problem. The $15 per wall sq.ft area for the ICF is a general ballpark figure. The only way to get a true figure is to take your house plans to a local ICF contractor and get a bid from them.

Is this going to be a DIY project ?

To some degree, yes.  We're definitely contracting out the concrete, though.  Electrical and plumbing are to be determined yet (J can do it, hoping to find tradesmen who will discount for his participation).  If the pricing is too far out, we may diy those.  HVAC we're doing since we're doing essentially three huge rooms with minisplits and an ERV (no ductwork).  Roofing is looking like it's going to be structural metal SIPS with EPDM, which is manageable.  Since we're not doing any interior cladding or anything complex, it's really just mechanical within a big finished shell.  Hiring out well and septic too - that's way beyond what I'd want to try to mess with.  Depending upon how we decide to do bucking, framing, and flashing, I'd like to put in the windows myself as well.  Might not work out that this is reasonable, but I'm parsing through what I can do and what I can't as I go along.

More than likely, we'll have to at least hire out someone to review our electrical and plumbing plans.  I'm starting on the circuit plans now, and probably starting mapping plumbing runs in the next month.  I would like to do as much of the grunt work myself as I can, both to save money (I'm a stay home mom) and because honestly I am having so much fun I can barely stand it.  There's something amazing in building something - every time I walk through the house, I'll know that I was a part of building it. 

One of the attractive points of the ICF was not having to hire a contractor (except the concrete).  I am hoping to find a GC in the area who might help in a consultant role so that I can have someone tell me I'm being an idiot if need be.  In the county we're moving to, I can GC everything, pull permits, etc - all except the well. 

More of an owner-GC than a DIY really.

The $15 is a ballpark figure. My CC guy quoted $10/SF of wall for a DIY project with the pours contracted. I didn't catch that you were looking for this info as you were discussing just about everything else except plain old ICF So far our project is looking to come in slightly less than that, but we built all the bracing and scaffolding and will be rolling that lumber into the internal walls so that saved a significant amount on the wall build. Another good piece of information he passed along was the name of an engineer familiar with ICF...

It might be worth some consulting time with an engineer to take a sketch of your floor plan and your ideas for some of the possible components and discuss it with them. That might help you to get some focus on specific components/systems that would work easier together than others yet still meet your goals. Might also be able to point you to an architect or draftsman to put the sketches into approvable drawing form. Can you do this yourself? Yes you can using references such as PCA100 to prove out the structural integrity, especially if you are in a non seismic zone. But I am pretty certain that a plan with a PE stamp for a re-enforced concrete structure will pass thru your local building department approval process a lot easier...

Good Luck

Most of the info I've asked about with regard to ICFs has been details and compatibility stuff, not really about them specifically.  I have had a difficult time getting questions answered by the manufacturer sales reps, which makes me really worry about the delivery end.  Since ICFs and cast-in-place both have pros and cons for us, I'm really starting to lean towards the cips.  I will likely get an engineer's help since it looks like we're not going to be doing much that's typically used in residential around here, so I think I'll just save myself that headache from the get-go.  Especially since the more I think about the surface of the walls being concrete the more I love it - I think the ICFs would be easier to get through.

Do the manufacturers perhaps not like selling directly to owner-builders?  That just occurred to me as a possible reason.  It worked out well for me though, I think - I'm thinking that the end result is one that I'll be much happier with doing cast in place walls. 

Like you l served as helper when I needed pros. The exception was the electrician, who declined my services. Wiring switches and receptacles seems easy but poor connections there are a major source of problems and he didn't want liability for my mistakes. Can't argue with that. As well, He bent a lot of conduit in my aac house, which is something of an art.

While you don't need an engineer for masonry walls, you will for a sip roof.

Lbear is flat wrong about residential concrete. Your circumstance will vary, but block houses are SOP in FL. Cast and block are STD where ever basements are common. Gunite is as common as swimming pools. Speaking of which, Superior Walls AG system shot with gunite inside would be easy to wire, efficient and hard from both directions.

Posted By mariaD on 20 Apr 2016 10:03 AM
To some degree, yes.  We're definitely contracting out the concrete, though.  Electrical and plumbing are to be determined yet (J can do it, hoping to find tradesmen who will discount for his participation).  If the pricing is too far out, we may diy those.  HVAC we're doing since we're doing essentially three huge rooms with minisplits and an ERV (no ductwork).  Roofing is looking like it's going to be structural metal SIPS with EPDM, which is manageable.  Since we're not doing any interior cladding or anything complex, it's really just mechanical within a big finished shell.  Hiring out well and septic too - that's way beyond what I'd want to try to mess with.  Depending upon how we decide to do bucking, framing, and flashing, I'd like to put in the windows myself as well.  Might not work out that this is reasonable, but I'm parsing through what I can do and what I can't as I go along.

One of the attractive points of the ICF was not having to hire a contractor (except the concrete).  I am hoping to find a GC in the area who might help in a consultant role so that I can have someone tell me I'm being an idiot if need be.  In the county we're moving to, I can GC everything, pull permits, etc - all except the well. 

More of an owner-GC than a DIY really.

What type of metal SIPs are you going with for the roof?

Once you find an ICF contractor then you can ask them if you are able to help maybe stack the block to help reduce costs. The complexity comes into play with the rebar bending & placement, bracing the walls, cutting and squaring off doors and window buck areas, getting the walls straight and square and of course the pour. That's why it's important to find an ICF contractor who knows his stuff. Most wood frame contractors, if you tell them you are doing a house with concrete ICF walls to the roof, they will look at you like a deer in headlights. Some don't even know what ICF stands for. They will immediately want to charge you an arm and a leg because it's something they and their trades are not well-versed in and will charge you more for it.

Any of the window and door cutting, squaring, bracing and installing the windows will require a well skilled tradesman. Depends on your skill set but it's not that easy with ICF concrete.

For perspective, an IRC 2012 code-min mass wall in US climate zone 3 & 4 (most of NC) would be only 2" EPS/ R8 on the exterior of a CMU or concrete wall. From a thermal performance point of view a 2.5" + 2.5" ICF would be overkill.

http://publicecodes.cyberregs.com/icod/irc/2012/icod_irc_2012_11_sec002.htm

From a limits of financial rationality point of view, a good starting place is in Table 2, p10 of this document:

http://buildingscience.com/file/5806/download?token=GouEIX9Y

Note, those are "whole assembly R" performance numbers, not center cavity and does not include thermal mass benefits (of which there would be some in an NC zone 3 climate, but not nearly as much as in AZ.)

At those numbers it's pretty straightforward to build a Net Zero Energy house with a solar array that fits on the roof, using fairly modest HSPF 10/SEER 14 heat pumps for HVAC.

The zone-3 recommended R20 whole-wall type performance with can be achieved in a mass wall with about R17 continuous insulation on the exterior (or in the middle). That can be either 4" of EPS or 3" of polyisocyanurate. To do it with a low mass wall takes 5" of EPS, or 4" of polyiso.

With metal SIP roofing you have to figure out how to defeat the thermal bridging where the SIP crosses the wall. You'd need an R35 or better SIP to duck under the code-max U0.030. To hit Net Zero Type performance you're looking at an R45+ SIP.

Putting at least some insulation under the slab keeps it warm enough to limit the summertime mold issues as well as comfort issues in the coldest days of winter. If you're uncomfortable with the notion of foam inside the house, there are now rigid rock wool solutions:

http://www.roxul.com/files/RX-NA_EN/pdf/Technical%20Bulletins_Guides/Residential/TECHNICAL%20BULLETIN%20-%20UNDER%20SLAB%20INSULATION.pdf

They do have 1.25" as a standard thickness, and that would pretty much do it. If foam, 1.5" of EPS would be the right choice.

Using higher R/inch XPS for walls or sub-slab has a heftier environmental footprint due to the HFC134a blowing agent used. EPS and polyiso are blown with pentane, which is far more benign, and rock wool has an even lower footprint per R. As XPS loses it's blowing agent over a handful of decades it's performance drops to that of EPS of equal density. EPS loses all of it's blowing agent before it leaves the factory, and is labeled at it's fully depleted R-value.

Posted By Dana1 on 20 Apr 2016 02:32 PM


With metal SIP roofing you have to figure out how to defeat the thermal bridging where the SIP crosses the wall. You'd need an R35 or better SIP to duck under the code-max U0.030. To hit Net Zero Type performance you're looking at an R45+ SIP.

Dana,

Since metal is the absolute worst thermal bridge out there. Wood at least would provide some R-Value. Could the metal SIP cause condensation issues where the metal SIP thermally bridges from the outside and meets the warm inside air temps?

I'm looking at Permatherm's flat metal roofing SIPs - they have an R42 steel structural roofing panel that's hardly more than the R34.  The builder rep I spoke with from the manufacturer said that stripping the SIP skin for the few inches where it crossed over the sandwich wall insulation would eliminate the thermal bridge at the intersection between the wall and ceiling, and any of the associated condensation problems from it. 

The roof cladding can either be EPDM, concrete, whatever really depending upon sloping (I want flat).  I'm going to have to get engineering for this to get help with spanning and supports anyway, even if I didn't choose a heavier cladding material.  The structure is pretty simple geometrically speaking, so hopefully not to expensive or difficult to pull off.

How gorgeous would it be to have wrought iron plant hanger arms from all four sides of the support columns?  I've been wondering how I was going to keep the cats out of the plants (picked the ones that NASA researched for indoor air quality), and it looks like I have a solution.  I can do the kitchen island around the column in that block, which would be another route to run conduit for wiring anything in the island. 

We're putting the 12k Mitsubishi minisplits in each of the three blocks (380, 450, and 700 sf each).  We may need to go up a size in the 700sf space, especially given that the computer servers will be in that area - J has always used a dedicated floor airco in his server room, but I don't think those are terribly efficient compared to these.

Looks like netzero might be pretty attainable!

Lbear: Steel SIPs in cold climates very much do run into condensation due to the thermal bridging. An OSB clad SIP wouldn't have that issue.

mariaD: A 1-ton Mitsubishi can heat & cool more than just the 700' space of a high R building., and is ridiculously oversized for the smaller space. It's likely that a 3/4 tonner could handle the space too. Don't commit until you've run the room by room heating & cooling load numbers. There are 1500' homes in my neighborhood heated & cooled with a pair of 3/4 ton units, one per floor, in a location with a 99% outside design temp of 0F.

Though they are modulating systems, modulation is not infinite, and if it's not modulating, cycling on/off it's not nearly as efficient as the HSPF & SEER numbers would indicate. The 3/4 ton -FH09NA and the 1/2 ton FH06NA can both throttle back to about 1600 BTU/hr @ +47F in heating mode and 1700 BTU/hr in cooling mode which is about as good as it gets. But that might even be your heat load at the outside design temp. (Where are you, exactly?) It may be more efficient to combine the spaces and serve the whole house with a single 1.5 ton mini-ducted mini-split. The Fujitsu -18RLFCD can modulate down to 3100 BTU/hr @ +47F, and can still deliver about 20,000 BTU/hr @ +17F (and has fully specified output down to -4F.)

I read several pieces about choosing mini splits over this year - and I had come to those choices as well until I read the recommendations for square footage on wholesale supplier sites.  I really don't want to mess with ducts at all - they carry sound from room to room quite a bit, and my son can hear something he thinks is interesting and fixate on it for hours.  Our heating loads will likely stay very low (we'll be near Wilmington NC, zone 3 warm/humid).  Jan/Feb average hi/lo is about 56/36.  I chose the mitsubishi based on an awesome article contribution in Green Building Advisor that it just so happens was written by someone named Dana...something tells me that might not be a coincidence!  In the article, it seems like I remember that the mitsubishis did better with heavy cooling loads and had better customer support in this area, I'll look back and see.  That was in 2013 I think, though, so much may have changed. 

It doesn't get terribly cold there, and we wouldn't run the heat in the 350-400 space any higher than 70.  The kitchen/den central block at around 450sf likely will be locked at 72 (and I cook quite a bit), and the 700sf likely locked at 73 with the contribution of a huge computer storage array that uses a 1-ton floor airco during the summer about half the time when it's being used more heavily. 

The big deal will be cooling loads and humidity control. May through September all have average highs from 80-89, and it's like a sauna.  We already have freestanding dehumidifiers that we're really pleased with for each of the 3 blocks, so the fall and spring transitions won't be so awfully wet.  We're using south-facing overhangs, no east-west windows, and I'll likely even use blackout shades for the really hot days as well.  My son gets extremely agitated when he's not (autism) and has to sleep with a few heavy blankets (one of them is a 15-lb weighted corduroy, wow).  So we really have to keep things cool. 

One thing I'm stumped on is the ERV.  I'll always use the freestanding dehumidifiers - before we got those I was running the heat and then running the AC afterwards because I felt like I was walking in carpet puddles.  They are magnificent, and if they've affected the energy cost it's been unnoticeable.  Between my son's sensitivities, sensitive computer equipment, and quite frankly me being borderline phobic of mold, I don't know that I need the ERV, and could likely use just an HRV - especially since most of what I've read indicates that the ERVs may help a bit, but they can't do it alone.  Also, given that we're not breaking up the blocks into pieces beyond bathrooms, a laundry, and the server room, I'd love to take advantage of not needing ducted HVAC and use a plain old fans.  Is it possible/reasonable to use exhaust fans in the bathrooms and laundry, and then link cycling with a mechanical louvered supply vent in the same block?  That would take care of pressurizing from using bathroom vents and if we could time it to ASHRAE it seems like we could have the bathroom vent fan run double duty rather than having another completely separate system.  Then we'd be cycling out from the stale spots similarly to a suggested HRV setup I read about somewhere without having to run any ducting(my son loves to throw things in the returns and vents, no explanations on why).  Seems like it would be an easier system to service as well. 

I thought about resale on some of these issues, and with the ceilings being 9', it would be possible to install drop ceilings to run ducts through if we ever wanted to move and sell.  I'm planning on putting utility panel blockouts in the form walls and covering them with panels that look like paintings for our time there so that the infrastructure is there should someone want to break the bigger spaces into smaller ones.  Who knows, maybe in ten years I might want to. 

It's been my experience that helping with ICF doesn't really work, maybe it will. There isn't a lot of $$ in just stacking ICF's. They stack too quickly to justify a large sum. Where the contractor makes the money is doing all the concrete. If you had someone supervising you to DIY the ICF's that might work depending on your schedule. I would advise against helping the electrician also. Liability and the amount of $$ that you would really save come to mind. The interior framing, setting windows and doors, trims interior and exterior you can do these and save. There is a lot of co-ordination that takes place between the trades with scheduling and areas occupied. If you are acting as a GC that will keep you pretty busy.