Waterbury builder extols efficiency of insulated concrete
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By MEL HUFF Staff Writer - Published: March 30, 2008
WATERBURY – Most people probably see this as a risky time to build a spec house, but Joel Baker is banking that they're wrong. As heating costs climb to stratospheric levels, he believes that consumers will increasingly weigh the cost not merely of buying a house, but of living in one.
"The American public needs to raise its expectations of what's acceptable in a home," he said last week in the office of VTICF, his base for kindling a revolution in the prevailing method of home construction.
Baker is meeting demands for energy efficiency with a type of construction that has been used for years in Europe and Canada but is relatively uncommon in the United States. He builds houses not with lumber but concrete.
More particularly, Baker builds with insulated concrete forms, or ICFs. Two layers of expanded polystyrene foam are held together with plastic, stacked like Legos and filled with raw concrete to make walls. The foam, which is left in place, gives the walls an R-value (a measure of resistance to heat loss) twice that of stick-built construction insulated with R-19 fiberglass, Baker said.
In addition to the high R-value, two other factors contribute to ICF's energy efficiency. One is the lack of joints or seams in the poured concrete walls, which eliminates air flow. The other is the heavy mass of the building envelope: The walls act as thermal storage units, gaining and losing heat slowly, keeping interiors warm in winter and cool in summer.
Baker tried insulated ICFs for the first time in 1995, when his construction company was building an addition to the Holiday Inn in Waterbury. Using concrete instead of wood or metal was new to him, but he and his customer, who "understood construction and was open to new ideas," studied the building system and decided to try it as an alternative to what Baker described as "hiring a small army of masons to stack concrete blocks." The process of handling and assembling the 6-pound foam forms was so streamlined that Baker was able to save the customer $20,000 on the 6,000 square foot project. "That was real money, especially in 1995," he noted.
The project was an epiphany for Baker. "Once I used the product," he said, "I knew instinctively that this was a better way to build something with walls that you want to keep heat inside of."
Baker, who has worked in the construction industry all his adult life, grew up in Waterbury, went away for awhile and in 1977 began building track houses in Colorado. He returned to Waterbury a little more than 20 years ago and in 1986, started a general construction company.
"After doing more and more ICF jobs, I became more and more convinced this was the way I had to build," he said. "I don't really want to build with sticks any more. I want to build with concrete. I'm passionate enough about it I've refused a lot of work."
In 2000, Baker started VTICF to sell and distribute ICF forms and teach other builders how to use them. The expanded foam in the Amvic system Baker uses – unlike the extruded pink, blue and green foam used over wood frame walls – contains no chlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons or formaldehyde. Among their other "green" qualities, the forms contain 60 percent recycled content by weight, and their use can cut construction waste for exterior walls to less than 1 percent.
Baker has built the first of six ICF homes in a planned unit development called Green Eden on a wooded hillside between Waterbury and Richmond. The deep windowsills are the only clue to the unusual construction of the walls. Siding is attached to the exterior foam blocks, and sheetrock to the interior foam blocks, with screws.
Polished concrete floors act as the building's heat delivery system. PEX tubing – cross-woven polyethylene tubing designed to carry heated water and transfer the heat to the surrounding medium – is embedded in concrete on the first floor. PEX tubing also runs through the suspended concrete slab of the second floor. The water will be heated by 48 evacuated-tube solar collectors, which according to Baker are more efficient in cold weather than flat plate collectors. Because of the extraordinary insulating ability of the walls, the house can be heated with water heated only to 85 degrees. Standard baseboard heat requires water heated to 180 degrees, he noted.
Baker is well aware that innovators often take "arrows to the chest," but he is counting on enlightened Vermont consumers to deliver him from such a fate.
"Three hundred years ago we built with logs because it was all we had," he said. "A few sawmills got built, and then we started building with dimension lumber. That was better than what we had. In the '50s we started using a little bit of insulation because we could … In the '70s we went from two-by-fours to two-by-sixes because more insulation was better and we wanted to increase our efficiency.
"Now we're ready for the next big leap. So now, if you're building a new house, if you know the stuff's there and there's someone like me that's waving it in front of you, why wouldn't you jump on it?" he asks. "Why would you do anything else?"
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