CTPH Roundtable: Let’s Talk About ICF

[SH] So, for anyone who’s joining us for the recording, this is the Connecticut Passive House monthly community roundtable and Ken Lynch from Tremco has been very gracious in donating his time and expertise to talk to us about some of the products that his company has to offer. So, I will hand it over to Ken to take it away. 

Thanks for inviting me to speak. Again, my name is Ken Lynch. I’m the senior technical sales executive with the Tremco Construction Products Group covering the New England area, I’ve been with Tremco for about 25 years. Most of that time I was focused on residential and light commercial, I’m sorry, residential light commercial, waterproofing and air barriers. And then the last 60 years, I’ve also been focused on insulated concrete forms, which we’re going to talk about today. And that can be for any type of a project, not just residential. And we’ll show you some examples here. 

A little bit of background on who Tremco is in case you’re not familiar with us. We’re owned by RPM International. They’re a publicly traded company. Kind of a neat fact about them, they’ve increased their dividend 51 years in a row. There’s only been a handful of companies that can say they’ve increased the dividend that many years. It was founded in 1947, we’re based out of Ohio, just over about $7 billion in sales worldwide. RPM is broken into four divisions. Most people know us from our consumer group, which is products like they go to a paint store or a hardware store or a box store, Rusto-leum, DAP caulking, Varathane, plastic woods, Zinsser paints, a lot of those commercial brands of what people know us for mostly. 

But on the construction side, Tremco Construction Products Group, we’re broken into a few different categories. We all kind of work together as a team. We have Dryvit who makes each exterior insulated finishing system. New Brick, which is an interesting product. It’s a lightweight insulated brick. Obviously, Nudura insulated concrete forms. We have Tremco commercial waterproofing and sealants. Prebuck, which is a laminated strand lumber window and door bucking system and also an excellent parapet cap. I know we have a few other businesses you can see up there as well, but we kind of all work together and focus on protecting all six sides of your structure from moisture, air infiltration and thermally. We have 35 different scopes of work. 

I won’t go through all of them, but if it’s on the building envelope, whether it’s below slab, below grade, above grade, on the roof, parking decks, pretty much anything that you can think of that needs protection from water or air infiltration or thermally, we have products for it. 

From the structure, whether it’s insulated concrete forms, we have glass mat sheathing for metal frame construction that has a factory applied air and water barrier on it. Right out to all the waterproofing and air barrier and glazing products and then even your cladding systems. We have metal panels. We have the EIFS. We have lots of different choices out there to have the whole building envelope. The beautiful thing about that is you don’t have to worry about if products compatible with each other. Do they adhere to each other? If there’s a problem on the job, there’s no pointing fingers in case you have one product or an air barrier and another product at your window flashing. If somebody else is caulking to seal the window, no pointing fingers. Just one throat to choke if something goes wrong and one hand to shake hopefully when everything goes right. 

I’m going to jump into ICFs or insulated concrete forms now. ICFs that stay in place forms. It’s two panels of expanded polystyrene or EPS that’s held together with- […]

So again, insulated concrete forms, stay in place forms, typically two panels of EPS foam, expanded polystyrene, which are held together with an engineered cross tie or a web that’s molded into the foam to create the foam unit. In those webs are where you place the reinforcement bars for horizontal and vertical reinforcement. You can lock the reinforcement bars, the steel rebar into the web, and in many instances, you do not need to tie the rebar if it’s what we call a non-contact lapse place. So, it allows installation a little bit faster. When you’re building with ICF, you place the horizontal rebar as you’re building the wall. Typically, residentially, I would say you’re looking at maybe number four rebar every 36 inches horizontally and maybe every 24 inches vertically, but there is engineering ICF is listed in the IRC. Depending beyond two stories or 16 feet, you would need outside engineering to tell you the exact reinforcement schedule and sizing. But after you have the rebar in there, you place the concrete and then your final product is an insulated reinforced monolithic concrete wall. […]

So, in terms of ICF, when we’re talking about ICF, we refer to the thickness of the concrete that’s in the wall. So, if the typical, what we’re going to do on most residential and honestly, even most commercial above grade or below grade is either going to be a six-inch core wall or an eight-inch core wall. But ICF is usually available in two-inch increments from four-inch, six-inch, eight-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch. And then there are unassembled forms if you need something thicker than that. I’ve been on projects where we had three-foot-thick walls. So, we took some web connectors, some of the 12-inch webs, and we built out the wall to 36 inches. So, you have flexibility in whatever you want. When you’re looking at this picture on this, so let me go back to the core thickness. So, the core inch, if we’re doing a six-inch core, the foam is typically two and five eighths inches on both sides of the wall. So overall dimension from inside face to outside face is 11 and a quarter inches. And then obviously eight-inch would be 13 and a quarter and et cetera, as you go up. 

Every eight inches, as I mentioned, you have that cross web or that tie. That is also where your stud or your attachment strip is. So, if you look at the picture on the right-hand side, you can see what the attachment strip looks like with the foam removed. And then you have like a two by sitting on top of it. So, we’re going to have our stud every eight inches as opposed to every 16 inches or every 24 inches if you were doing advanced framing. And that stud is going to be five eighths and an inch below the surface of the foam. So, you’re going to screw your drywall directly to it on the inside and then you’re cladding to it on the exterior side. 

So, once you put these walls up, you’re basically ready for your electrical plumbing and then your drywall and the outside just go right up with your cladding. From a design flexibility standpoint, one of the misconceptions with ICF is that you can only build a box and you can only do a foundation. We have standard forms and then one of the unique things about the Nudura form is it’s eight feet long by 18 inches high. Most forms are going to be four feet long by 16 inches high, which is five and a third square feet. So, we’re 12 square feet. We’re going to go up a lot faster, less seams, less bracing, less labor. We have fully reversible 90-degree corners so you don’t have to specify I need so many lefts and so many rights. Ours are fully reversible, left and right, up and down. So those are the standard products, but we also have 45 degree corners. 

We have a brick ledge. You can see that in the top right there where it’ll flare out about four and a half inches. That can carry up to 27 feet of brick. 

Radius forms. So again, you can build anything that you’re looking for. 

I’m going to show you a neat picture here coming up on the next slide, but that can be factory cut or it can be done in the field if you have an experienced installer. The Nudura 1 series is a one-sided foam panel with the removable reusable plywood panel on the other side. So, you put the rebar in it, pull the concrete, remove that plywood panel. Now you have exposed concrete. It’s great for doing elevator shafts because now you can have the same trade that is constructing your exterior walls, build the elevator shaft rather than having to bring in a mason. We do that on fire stations for the apparatus bay, parking garages, school gymnasiums, or any application where they’d like the look that exposed concrete. 

And I also show the bracing system on there. Every job using ICF pretty much is going to use a bracing system to hold it in place to make sure the wall is nice, plumb and square. And it’s a scaffolding system while they’re placing the wall and placing the concrete. So again, talking about the design flexibility, this is a commercial building we did a couple of years ago outside of Buffalo, New York. As you can see, it was completely built out of radius. Performing Art Studio, a pretty neat project. This won an award at the ICF builder magazine annual awards out of the world of concrete a couple of years ago. But that radius design makes it real flexible no matter what you’re designing, including swimming pools. 

We do lots of swimming pools with ICF. The insulation there allows you to the pool to maintain its temperature longer so you can extend the season of the pool. We have lots of customers in Vermont who use your pool year-round. They just have a good cover on it. And the ICF keeps you from losing that heat out into the soil. And again, because you can get the radius, you can build whatever shape that you want. 

So, get into a little bit of the benefits of building with ICF now. One of the big ones obviously is energy efficiency. You’re going to have no thermal bridging in ICF. And we’re going to get into each one of these in a little more depth here in the coming slides. Fire resistance, obviously that’s going to increase the safety. Sound resistance, better living, better working environment. Very important, especially when you get into some of the medical facilities or assisted living where the residents are really affected by any noise. So, if you can control the sound, that’s a great asset. Also, on apartment buildings. Number one reason people will move out of our apartment buildings because of sound. 

Storm resistance, give you the peace of mind and again, safety. Indoor air quality. You’re going to get probably one ACH 50 or less when you build with ICF. And that’s really what comes down to your windows and your penetrations because the continuous concrete and the continuous insulation are going to prevent any air infiltration. 

And then the speed of construction. You can build faster year-round. Just a perfect curing agent for concrete. 

So, from a thermal resistance, I don’t know if everybody on the call is from Connecticut or New England, but most of New England now, and I’m especially Connecticut is requiring on a residential wall, at least an R 30. The Nudura ICF that I showed you with the two and five eighths inches of foam is about an R 23 and a half. 

So, I get the question, how can we use that in Connecticut? If the code is R 30. ICF is considered a mass wall and in Connecticut or in climate zone five, I should say a mass wall R value is required as an R 13. So, the ICF almost doubles the required R value. But one of the unique things about building with ICF because of the thermal mass of the concrete, the stated R value is actually lower than the effective R value. For instance, if you used an R 21 batt of say fiberglass insulation, I don’t see that too much anymore. But if you did, and you had any air infiltration, your actual performance, the effective R value could be much lower than that. It could be R 16, it could be R 12, it could be our eight, all depending upon how much air infiltration you have. But with an ICF wall with the concrete in it and from the thermal mass, the stated R value of R 23 and a half, your effective R value is going to be north of R 40. So, when you’re doing your mechanicals and you’re sizing them, you really want to use that number. Otherwise, you’re going to be oversizing the system, which can lead to short cycling and the air conditioning and it’s not going to be very energy efficient. 

There was some reporting done out there by the club laboratory, and they compare the thermal mass of a traditional framed wall versus an ICF wall. And they went anywhere from minus 31 degrees on the exterior to plus 131 degrees Fahrenheit and had an interior temperature of 72 degrees. It took the wood wall four and a half hours to reach equilibrium on the ICF wall, it took 144 hours. So big difference. 

You’re going to start your heating season cooler in the fall, the cooling season later in the spring, it’s going to be a really comfortable energy efficient building. 

Just for some reason, you wanted more insulation. You wanted a higher R-value for whatever reason. There are different options out there. Nudura has a custom exterior panel that’s the one on the left-hand side, where you have the standard two and five eighths foam, and then we factory laminate extra insulation to usually the exterior side of it. The only downside to this product is now your attachment strips, which were five eighths of an inch beneath the surface of the foam are now buried whatever the thickness of that foam is. If you’re doing a stucco finish or a textured acrylic finish system or EIFS or masonry, it doesn’t matter. That works perfectly fine. 

On the right-hand side is another option where we have these foam inserts. And I didn’t mention this earlier, but the Nudura insulated concrete forms at least, a lot of these are flat, but the New Dura one, it has dovetails into them. So even if you’re not using the inserts, what that does is when you pull the concrete, it fills up the dovetails and locks everything in nice and tight. So, it’s not going to move, and you can’t get any air infiltration or moisture behind it. These foam inserts are also dovetailed. So, they’ll slide and interlock into the dovetail on the foam panel. And what you, so if you wanted to say add four inches of foam and you were going to have a six-inch core wall, you’d go to a 10-inch core wall and then slide in the four-inch foam inserts between the webs. And now you’re back to a six-inch, but you get the extra four inches of insulation.

The most common one we use now is called the XR35. That’s the one in the middle. That’s four inches of foam on both sides. But unlike the custom exterior panel, the web on that one, or your attachment strip, the stud is still only five eighths of an inch below the surface. So that’s going to be stated our value of R35. An effective R value north of R50. So, you can really get whatever you want. You could take the XR35 and then put foam inserts into it. So, you can, you can build whatever you need. But for the most part in New England, we’re finding that the XR, the standard two and five eighths is more than enough, including on passive hosts. 

Fire resistance. So, this has been in the news a lot lately. A six-inch core wall of ICF will have a four-hour fire resistance, six hours or greater, I should say, I’m sorry, six hours, six inch or greater. Four-inch core wall will give you two-hour fire rating. The picture that you’re seeing there on the right-hand side is outside of San Diego, California. I believe it’s Paradise, California. After some wildfires a few years ago, you could see everything burned to the ground except for the three houses built out of ICF. They had fire resistant roof shingles and cladding on that that helped it withstand the flames and the heat. And there are a few other things with the soffits and stuff that you need to look at when you’re building. You really want to keep the air from getting inside the building so the fire doesn’t jump in there. But yeah, this is just a testament to the safety of building with ICF. 

If anybody does multifamily construction out there, every year you hear of a couple of wood frame buildings that burn to the ground during construction because they don’t have the fire suppression in place yet. So, as a result of that, the insurance during the construction is much higher for a wood frame building than for an ICF building. 

The closest market we have on this chart is in, I guess, Edgewater, New Jersey. And you can see it’s almost double the insurance for a wood frame building versus an ICF building. So that’s another way you can improve your savings or your initial build cost with ICF. 

From a sound barrier standpoint, I did talk about this a little bit earlier, but ICF will be an STC or a sound transmission classification of 50. Traditional construction is going to have an STC rating around 30. If you see the landscapers out there with their power tools or construction workers, somebody using a jackhammer and they’re wearing the air protection, that’s an STC rating around 30 as well. So ICF is going to be significantly quieter than traditional construction. And you can even get up to an STC rating of 71 or higher if you wanted to. Because of this, if you’re building in a hotel or an office building or a house or an apartment building or anything near an airport, near a train station, busy highways, building out of ICF is a great way to do that. And again, to keep those buildings quiet so you have going to have less turnover, and the residents won’t be disturbed. 

The picture on that you’re showing is a movie theater. That’s another good use for it. We even did it on the demising walls. We have a movie theater in Danbury, Connecticut that’s built with ICF. 

Very wind resistant. So, the walls can be designed to withstand wind speeds up to 250 miles per hour. Coastal areas, tornadoes, certainly in hurricane prone regions, we see a lot of ICF. The picture on the right-hand side, the top right and the bottom right after tornadoes, you can just see all the devastation in both of those pictures. In the bottom picture, there’s what five houses there and four of them were completely destroyed by the tornado and the other one’s an ICF house. It had some damage to its wood framed roof, but the structure itself was fine. And then on the left-hand side, I’m going to get these on the next slide here. 

You have Hurricane Katrina on the right side and then Hurricane Michael in 2018 down in Mexico Beach, Panama City, Florida. So, the damage from Hurricane Katrina was mostly due to storm surge. The red dotted line in that picture on the bottom right shows how high the storm surge came up on this particular ICF building. So, like the tornado, everything in the area was pretty much demolished except for the ICF house. It lost some windows, had to do some water mitigation, but after that, they could continue building the house. They didn’t have to start from scratch. It was still structurally sound. 

And then that house on the left after Hurricane Michael, that’s become kind of famous in construction areas that they call it the last house standing. FEMA stayed there during rescue and recovery after the hurricane. And again, just like the picture with the wildfires and the picture with the storm surge from Katrina, pretty much everything around it except for some concrete buildings in the background or CMU buildings were destroyed by the hurricane. If you look really closely, there’s actually a house standing behind the ICF house. So we always say the moral of the story there is if you don’t build with ICF, build behind ICF. 

So another advantage of ICF is this again, the safety. I’ve heard three instances of this already this winter. Two of them were in Massachusetts. I heard the local news, and one was down in North Carolina. The one in North Carolina, there was a bunch of kids at a house party. The police showed up, seven kids jumped into a car and sped away, lost control of the car. And you can see the video they showed on the news. The homeowner was sitting on the front porch and the car crashed right not too far from them right through their living room window wall and ended up in the living room. So, unfortunate for this driver, he had an ICF house, damaged the downspout, damaged them cladding and insulation, but the house was structurally fine. People inside didn’t even know what happened. They just heard a loud thump. And for any of you guys that interested, that’s it looks like a New York license plate. So, I don’t know what they say about New York drivers, but that’s that car lost that battle. 

So, because of the fire, the hurricane, the wind, the sound resistance, military loves to build with this, but they want to do their own testing. So, what they did is they built a bunch of six inch, four ICF boxes basically, with number four rebar 16 inches on center, took 50 pounds of military grade dynamite and blew it up. That’s the video they are blowing up. What’s left is what you see on the left-hand side. So, the foam initially absorbed the impact of the explosion and then the foam blew off it. But the wall, even though it had some minor cracking and spalling, it’s still structurally sound and on the interior side, a side benefit was the ICF stayed in place. The foam stayed on the wall. So, it protected anybody in the building from any flying fragments of concrete. 

EPS will not propagate mold growth, and it passes off fungi resistant testing. 

So, from an ICF building envelope, you’re going to get seven building elements in one product installed by one subcontractor. So that’s going to increase construction speed, reduce scheduling delays and mitigates performance risk of wall assembly. Again, because you have one contractor doing it. You have your structurally reinforced concrete, continuous air barrier, which is a continuous concrete and foam, continuous insulation. It’s a class two vapor barrier. You have the fire ratings that we talked about pretty much going to be a four-hour fire rating, your interior and exterior studs or attachment strips, and then your STC rating. 

From a green product standpoint, and there are LEED credits that you can get with ICF, you can improve building energy efficiency, I would say for minimum 25%, but easily up to 50%. Use is greater than 50% recycled materials by weight. So, we’re going to keep the foam from being in landfills and this product can be recycled or used. It’s a durable, long-lasting material. 

So, between the foam and the concrete, the building’s not going anywhere. It’s going to last a very long time, which is going to help reduce construction waste. There’s been many testings done on this and I can share some of the reports if anybody’s interested, but the life cycle assessment of ICF is better than many forms of traditional construction. It does have a higher carbon footprint at the beginning, but as you go through the life of these buildings, ICF is better from that standpoint than lots of different types of construction. And then in terms of LEED, you just contact me or ICF manufacturers for their reports on the point you can get with LEED. 

Exterior finishes, I’ve mentioned on the interior side, you’re pretty much going to do drywall. There are some other options, but that’s pretty much what we see on the exterior and all these pictures that you see in any of these slides, these are full ICF buildings all the way to the roof line. But you can really put whatever you want on this – brick, stone veneer, tile, cultured stone, stucco, eighths, metal panel, curtain wall systems, wood, cement board. 

I will say the only time you get a little bit extra work, and we see it up in New England along the coast, if you’re doing cedar shingles, it’s usually easier to skin the building in plywood and then attach your cedar shingles directly to that just because they have to be nailed so often. You could strap it, but that’s a lot of work. I think it could go faster if you just skinned it in plywood or some other type of sheathing. And again, everything is going to be screwed to it directly. 

From a construction sector, pretty much everything. We probably have examples of all of these going on in New England right now. So, besides your residential, single-family homes and foundations, pretty much you name it, we do it. It’s a great building product and with the energy codes now requiring higher R values, power, air infiltration, and from a cost standpoint, it really makes sense. 

I know in Connecticut for my residential wood frame building with the installation you need to get to R30, it’s probably going to be at a minimum cost neutral. If not, it’s going to cost less to build with ICF. Some of that will be dependent upon the complexity of the building and the experience of the ICF installer. 

These are some pictures of ICF projects. I’m looking at these here. The top left, that Habitat house is in Connecticut. The bottom right is in Connecticut and the middle right is also in Connecticut. So, these are projects that we’ve done in Connecticut. The top left is a walkout. So, it’s three stories in the back. That’s a garage over a garage. So, these are all built in Connecticut. 

The Habitat house has won some energy efficiency awards. Habitat for Humanity loves building out of ICF because they use predominantly volunteer labor. The insulated concrete forms, I mentioned earlier our block is 8 feet by 18 inches. That is 12 square feet, and it weighs about 15 pounds. A lot lighter than trying to lug around aluminum or wood framed concrete forms or plywood panels or framing lumber. 

So, whether you’re a volunteer or you’re a concrete guy or a framer, this is really a framer’s trade but less wear and tear on the body, easier for these subcontractors to hire labor and maintain their labor when they’re working with ICF. So, in a world where there’s labor shortages, especially in construction, that’s a big savings. 

[JC] I have a question… So, on that little Habitat house, you can see that the gable and roof is done at a zip. It looks like a zip system. Yes. The picture above it, it looks like the peaks are continuous. Right. How do they do that without the concrete running? Is that real? Am I looking at? 

Yeah. So, on the ICF houses above it, that is a concrete port into the gable… So, all of those pictures there, other than the Habitat House and obviously the one that’s just a foundation, all those gables that top right, you can see the elliptical window windows, eyebrow windows. We can cut the foam to whatever size you need. Then we just place it and pull the concrete right into it… We might adjust the slump of the concrete a little bit. 

[SH] Yeah. I was wondering if you have to put sort of like cap the diagonal, so it doesn’t lose out the sides. 

Right. But it’s amazing what these guys can do that do it all the time. They don’t need too much of a cap on it. But as they move up the wall, they certainly will. But as they’re pouring it, they won’t. And then they get to a certain height, then they’ll cap it and go up and go. It takes a little bit more skill to do that. So, for the ICF building, that was unconditioned space. They just said, you know what? We’re just going to frame it. But a lot of these projects, they will go up with the gable lens. Yeah. It’s cool. Yeah. It’s really easy to cut. We’ve done projects, I think it was in New Hampshire where there’s a lot of ledge. And there’s basically a boulder coming out of the ground. And we just scribed the ICF to fit right around the boulder. So, it was a nice, tight fit. It worked perfect. And if you tried to do that with traditional forms, that would have been very difficult. It would have been a lot of patching. 

Back to the habitat houses, we’re actually working, it’s very early, I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but I am. We’re working with them right now to try to do 38 passive homes they’re looking to build in Connecticut. So, they like the idea of ICF because of the thermal mass. And again, they’re using volunteers. It just makes it easy to get to those passive house standards building with ICF cost effectively. And obviously, it’s going to help control the costs for the residents of those habitat buildings. So, lots of options. 

This next slide is kind of showing some pictures of– so the picture, if you remember on the back, I’ll go back. That top left house is the bottom left house in this picture. That’s in New Fairfield, Connecticut. The top left is in Watertown, Connecticut. That is an ADA accessible house, zero clearance entry. And that has a garage over a garage on the backside. There’s another garage that goes underneath it. Top right is in Pound Ridge. The bottom right is in– I think that’s Middleborough, Massachusetts, even though it doesn’t look like a New England house with real Spanish tiles that’s in Massachusetts. It only helps not locally as the one in the middle. I think that’s in California, but I wanted to show the radius wall. 

Let’s see here. So, this is a multifamily project that we did in Queens, New York, built to– it was affordable housing, eight stories, and it was built to passive house standards, PHI standards. This was done back in 2017. They liked ICF because it’s near the water. It’s in a busy, young, and Queens area with noise, and obviously the noise makes a big difference. But really, their ability to meet the passive house standards was a big selling point on this. 

So, we’ve done lots of projects, whether they’re net zero or passive house. Speaking of net zero, for some reason, Kentucky leads the nation in energy efficient schools. They built the first net zero school in the country, and it happened to be built with our Nudura insulated concrete forms. They had solar, geothermal, and then the ICF. 

It’s tough to see, but if you look at the picture where it shows the forms, kind of that in the middle there, the middle of the building is the gymnasium, the auditorium, cafeteria, and they continue the ICF walls on the interior walls as well. So, what that does is when the kids are running around, making noise at gym class or at lunch, the adjacent classrooms are still quiet, so it doesn’t disturb the learning. Plus, since they’re down in Kentucky where there’s a lot of tornadoes, it’s a place for the community to go if there is a tornado and to be safe. This particular school saved almost a quarter of a million dollars annually back to the community for all the energy savings associated with it. 

The Slate Upper School in North Haven, Connecticut, this was with Patriquin Architects. They only did the foundation on this one. Interesting they were very interested in ICF and all the benefits of it, but they thought it was going to be price prohibitive. And when they sent it out to bid, it actually came in at lower cost than a traditional foundation. 

Plus, they were using another Connecticut company, Urban Mining, who basically takes the curbside recycling of glass bottles, they grind it down to a ground glass pozzolan, they call it Pozzotive, and that offsets some of the Portland cement, which is a way to reduce the carbon footprint, which I know that’s always a big issue with concrete, right? It’s the carbon which comes from the Portland cement. 

So, there’s lots of different products out there now that can help offset the carbon or the Portland cement. And this ground glass pozzolan that they used saved the equivalent of 13.5 cars or 6,700 gallons of gasoline a year. And you can see some of the EUI reduction numbers on there based upon what they want to achieve and what the AIA standards are. So pretty significant savings there. 

In the concrete industry, their goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete by 50% by 2028 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. Again, there’s lots of products out there, slag, fly ash, the ground glass pozzolan, lots of work being done. MIT Sustainability helps working on this, the NRMCA, National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. There’s reports out there now where concrete can actually sequester some of the carbon and store it. Looks for ways to cool cities. But yeah, concrete, it’s really come a long way. And there’s many different things you can look at when you’re building with concrete to help to reduce that footprint. 

From a foundation standpoint, I will say since it’s an engineered system, we can often go to a six-inch foundation if you normally spec a 10-inch foundation, or at minimum, you can go to an eight-inch. So, you’re going to save anywhere from 20% to 40% of your carbon footprint because you’re going to reduce your concrete by 20% to 40%. So even if you’re just looking for a simple way to reduce the carbon of a foundation that you need to put in, ICF can make that happen very easily. 

From a building code standpoint, it has all the codes needed. As I mentioned earlier, it’s in the IRC, all the codes in the US and in Canada, there’s engineering stamps in all 50 states for the rebar and the window lintel schedules. 

From an ICF technical training support, really, I think this is where Nudura stands out from everybody from all the other ICF manufacturers. We have online training academies that kind of go through the whole process of building with ICF. In person training classes, we just had one last month in Connecticut, we have one next month in Rhode Island. We pretty much have one every other month in New England. Those are in person full day classes. We have architects, builders, installers, homeowners, energy professionals, anybody looking to build to learn more about it. For architects, you do get five continuing education credits if you go to that course. 

We’re also working with the Connecticut Carpenters Union. This falls under the carpenter’s trade. 

We’re doing $100 million school right now, full school in Spencer, Massachusetts, 45-foot-tall gymnasium walls, everything out of ICF. It’s a carpenter’s trade. We’re working with them to train their apprentices, and they also bring their journeymen through the classes. We have a full day course there for ICF training. 

We offer lots of field support. We sell through distribution. Our distributors have the bracing systems and the knowledge to come out to the job sites and we also have our own training guide that will come out from a design standpoint. We have everything you’ll need from bid modeling to CAD details to generic specs, lead documentation, the installation guides. Everything is on our website. If you don’t see something, just contact us because we do have thousands of more details that are in our own library that we can share. We just want to make the process as easy as possible. 

I’m just going to use that school as an example. When that school started, they hired a company to do a feasibility study to see if they could even build with ICF. In Massachusetts, they had to build to TEDI standards, which is thermal energy design intensity. It’s a Canadian code, but they thought that ICF would be the best way to do it. They reached out to us. We gave them some national case study examples of schools we’ve done around the country, as well as in New England, who gave them local costs. They looked at it and said, “Yeah, this will fit into our budget.” When it came time to select a construction manager, they gave us the names of the construction managers that were going to be bidding on it. We brought them into our local distributor. We had meetings with them. Some of them came to our training classes. We wanted to avoid the fare factor because lots of times if people aren’t familiar with it, they’re going to put that fare into their price and they’re going to charge way too much for ICF. We got them comfortable. They selected a construction manager. Then when they were looking for the ICF sub, as I mentioned, that was going to be a union carpenter. We met with pretty much all. I think we met with either four out of five or four out of six of the contractors bidding on it. Same process. We went to our warehouse. We built a wall and went to our training classes. Actually, the company that was awarded the ICF flew down to one of our school projects down in Texas and spoke with the architects, the local installers, everybody involved just to get more information again to make sure that they did it properly. Once the project started, our distributors went out there and worked with them. Our own tech guys went out there and worked with them. We talked with everybody involved, the carpenters, sorry not the carpenters, the electricians, the plumbers. Maybe those are going to touch the wall, the cladding companies, just to make sure they understood how their products interacted with ICF. We’re not just going to sell the product and walk away. We’re going to support it through the whole process to make sure everybody’s comfortable because many times people often haven’t used ICF, and we want to make sure they’re comfortable doing it. 

That’s the end of the presentation. I appreciate it again. You guys have me and other, any other questions out there? 

[JC] Does that extra support come with the cost? 

For the most part, no. Some of our distributors, if you want them on site to pull the concrete, they will charge you to come out there and spend a half a day or a full day to pull the concrete. They’ll come out there just as a routine and especially if it’s somebody new, they’ll do what we call a pre-poor inspection. They’ll walk around the site and make sure everything’s done properly before they pour the concrete, and they can do a post-pour inspection. Many times, they come out when you first start to stack the block because that’s usually when the questions pop up. How do we do this? We’re doing this correctly. Yeah, no, our distributors will go out there and sometimes if it’s the right project, we will send our own tech guys out as well. 

We do, I didn’t mention this, but we do have a pre-cut program that can eliminate up to 30 to 40% of the labor. That is a great way to do it for somebody that’s new to ICF or has been doing ICF for a long time but needs to cut back on some costs. 

I’m going to go back really quickly here as I’m talking, but one of the pictures that I showed you was actually two homeowners, 65-year-old couple that took our training class. That picture on the bottom middle there next to the habitat, that house there was built by two homeowners. They had support of our distributor, but that’s a pretty big house. They actually have a swimming pool in the basement. While it can be a DIY because it’s really just little blocks for adults, it’s good to have that support. That’s something that we put ourselves on. 

[JC] Well, even like you mentioned, coordination with the siding. I can understand in the beginning when you’re setting up forms, but even later, once your stuff is in place and the sider comes in and he’s like, “How does this …” all those questions.

Right, right. Yeah. We try to get a pre-construction meeting and get all the parties in place at once so we can talk about it. But lots of times that doesn’t happen and we’re fielding phone calls. I was at a project in Connecticut. It was the same thing. They were putting up their cladding and they had some questions about window trim and corners and how does this get attached. So yeah, we’ll answer those questions. Routinely happens. We get phone calls about projects that are going on and we’ll help them out. 

Great. I think I’m good, Sara. 

[SH] Yeah. That’s neat how many passive house boxes it checks with air tightness and thermal. No thermal bridging. Continuous, yeah, right. That’s neat. I hadn’t really thought, even though you’ve presented this to us before in my office, I hadn’t really thought about the added benefits of the thermal mass in terms of keeping temperature. So, it really does have a lot of other good perks. And sound, the whole sound thing I hadn’t even thought about. 

Right. Yeah, sound is what we’re doing. So, Massachusetts saved the transit-oriented housing law. If the MBTA services your town, they want you to build multi-family housing with limited or no parking. And they usually have been near a train station and the noise there. So, we just finished one in Natick, Mass. That they switched to it at the last minute because of the, well, the energy efficiency they had to some of the Massachusetts towns now require building the passive home standards. There’s 18 communities, but also the noise. And they realized the benefit of retaining their renters in there because of its ability to keep the building quiet. 

[SH] Yeah. It was interesting you said a lot of people move because of sound. 

That’s another reason why people move out of apartment buildings. 

[JC] I was going to say bad neighbors. 

Yeah. Well, you could do the demising walls. Or both. With ICF. You don’t smell the fish that cook it in the microwave, and you don’t hear your neighbors. 

[SH] Yeah. Yeah. Well, also, sort of speaking of the interior walls, you know, you’re a gymnasium example. Yeah. You know, using it inside also. 

And you know, one of the things I didn’t mention that I think the passive house community would appreciate is from a company, from Tremco with all those coatings that we talked about that we make the waterproofing and the air barriers. 

We don’t, we, I’m not going to say 100%, but probably close to that. We don’t have any chemicals of concern. None of the red list products that the living building challenge wants you to avoid. We don’t have those in our products. Our products are environmentally friendly, non-hazardous, VOC compliant. 

So, we try to be a good steward when it comes to that. Sounds good. Yeah. 

[SH] Yeah. That’s great to know about. I’ve also heard you list off all the companies under Tremco’s umbrella and I’m always surprised how vast the list is. 

That’s a lot of products. And I will say with all those products, ICF is one of the fastest growing. Yeah. So, but yeah, we, they just keep, which is great for, they just keep bolting the line businesses that make sense for our other products or for the building envelope. 

So again, you can have that single source supplier. 

[SH[ One-stop shopping. 

Yeah, exactly. So, it’s nice to have a company that has the resources to do that and hopefully make it easy for everybody. 

[JC] So, the other thing you mentioned was the, I don’t know if it was a half day or one day building thing. 

Yeah. Yeah. So, the ICF was. 

[JC] Yeah. Maybe for architects, not just for builders. Is that information available on your website or could you send it to us? 

I could certainly send it to you. The next one we have, I believe is April 4th in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Just check my date, make sure the fourth is the right date. It’s a Tuesday. It’s either the fourth or the eighth. I’ll send it out, but it is April 8th. I’m sorry. April 8th in North Kingstown. It’s actually at our Dryvit plant. If you’re familiar with Dryvit, the EIFS manufacturer. 

And we occasionally do what we call coffee and concretes in Connecticut, where we invite architects and builders to an ICF project under construction. And then we kind of talk about the ICF and why the architect chose it and why the builder and homeowner chose it. And we get to kind of touch and feel the product. So, if we have any. 

[JC] That would be great. Yeah. 

[SH] Yeah. Yeah. Please do. Send those along. We’ll certainly put those on our calendar, and I’ll be sure to include those in the Connecticut Passive House newsletters.

Since Tremco is a BuildGreenCT sponsor, we definitely want to get the word out. 

[JC] I think a lot of people, too, in my office would be interested and have talked about Habitat for Humanity builds and a day out learning about those forms would be awesome. 

Yeah. I know that one in Hartford, we did that. We had a bunch of volunteers out there building it. I was out there, and I don’t know if you guys know Dominic DiCenzo. He was with the Connecticut Concrete Promotion Council. He has since retired, but yeah, we’ve worked on a few projects together. So hopefully we get this one I’m talking about that’s looking to build Passive House and we’ll do it out there as well. Yeah. That’d be great. 

[SH] Sure speaks to affordability and ease of construction that Habitat for Humanity is. 

It definitely does. And some of the, I know that the area that they built in in Hartford, it wasn’t the greatest of neighborhoods. A couple of the houses around it were boarded up and so besides the affordability and the energy efficiency, you get the safety and sound, which is big for them too. So yeah. 

[JC] Great. Sounds good. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. 

Thank you for the questions. 

[SH] Okay. Well, I’ll end our recording. I just officially want to thank Ken again for your time. 

Thank you.