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California
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Click on the city nearest you to find out more about concrete homebuilding
in your area:
For more information about concrete homebuilding in California, call:
California/Nevada Cement Promotion Council: (925) 735-1583
Concrete Masonry Association of California and Nevada: (916) 722-1700
Concrete Promotion Council of Northern California: (888) 633-0393
Southern California Ready Mixed Concrete Association: (626) 441-3107
In the wake of Southern California’s recent fires, many residents are asking themselves: Is my home fire-safe? Of all construction materials, concrete is one of the most resistant to heat and fire. More and more builders are offering residents the safest home possible, made with Insulating Concrete Forms (ICF), masonry, or stucco exterior cladding. In addition, lightweight concrete roofing materials also provide an additional margin of safety and fire resistance.
ICFs are follow foam blocks or panels that are stacked into the shape of the perimeter walls of a home. The forms are filled with reinforced concrete to create a solid structure, sandwiching a heavy, high strength material between two layers of high insulation foam. The resulting walls offer a long list of benefits: air tightness, strength, sound attenuation, insulation, pest resistance, fire resistance, and more. Masonry, reinforced and fully grouted, either with exposed architectural units or stucco acts much in the same way and also provides a high class of fire protection and hourly rating. Stucco cladding, which can be applied to both ICF and masonry, is manufactured from cement and also offers higher resistance to fires.
Unfortunately, wildfires are a fact of life in Southern California. Many
home fires in the California foothills and mountains are the result of burning
embers that float within the super heated air and smoke from an approaching
fire. Embers can fall several miles from a fire onto a wooden shake roof
or into eves and attic vents combusting wood and other building materials.
Lightweight concrete roof tiles and cement-based shingles provide a fire
resistant shell that offers additional time for the embers to burn themselves
out before they can ignite a roof made of other material.
Atascadero
This home has a Title 24 energy rating of R-65. For more information, contact David Horobin, architect, at (707) 251-9677.
Cathedral City
A ubiquitous packing foam that's been around since the 1960s could be about
to hit it big in Southern California's booming home-building business.
About
30 engineers, architects and contractors from around the state came
to tour a Cathedral City subdivision that is seeing
the region's first wide-scale use of a polystyrene-based material
in place of standard
wood framing to build homes. "I think it could catch on in more places," said
George Easton Sr., a structural engineering and construction consultant
based in
Fallbrook, who attended the tour.
About 160 adobe-style homes in a subdivision off Gerald Ford Drive, called
The Villages at Rio Del Sol, are being constructed with insulating
concrete forms. Its proponents say the technology provides significant
energy savings - between 30 and 50 percent lower heating and cooling costs
- because it better
insulates homes. Its makers say it also offers better sound-proofing
and resistance to mold, and allows faster construction with a wider variety
of
possible architectural designs.
Vera Novak, a Utah-based representative for Eco-Block who was in the valley
Thursday, said the technology is strong enough to allow for larger
windows and doorways to be incorporated into home designs, and still comply
with
California strict earthquake building-safety standards. "The windows in these homes are going to be bigger than those (nearby)
that were done with wood frames," she said. "People say they want
their homes to have sunnier, brighter rooms."
Rather than using wood framing for the initial steps of construction, builders
of the Cathedral City homes are using polystyrene foam blocks that
are assembled into forms, which in turn are filled with concrete to
create the framework
for each house. Because it combines the foam with concrete, proponents
say the method provides stronger support than previous technologies that
incorporated foam-based
materials.
Novak said that while the technology has previously been used on a spot
basis for one or two homes at a time across the country, and is also being
used in a smaller subdivision in Bakersfield, the Cathedral City project
marks the first time that the technology is being employed on a widescale
basis in Southern California.
According to Joseph Morreale, president of Rio Del Sol Development Inc.,
which is building the local subdivision, the technology does not add
to construction costs compared with standard wood framing. He added
that it has allowed the current phase of The Villages to proceed faster
than previous phases. Morreale predicted that more valley residential
and commercial developers will be using the polystyrene-based technology
as it becomes better known. "I think that commercial developers will especially take to this," Morreale
said.
The tour was organized by the Southern California Ready Mixed Concrete
Association, based in South Pasadena. Larry Maes, a products education
director for the association, said awareness of the technology is not high
in areas of Southern California that
don't experience high temperature fluctuations. But that could change
as energy
costs rise, and as builders and consumers look for ways to cut costs.
'That makes a lot of difference for people here," Maes said of high
seasonal energy use in the Coachella Valley. "I think commercial developers are going to be looking at this, to
save on their air-conditioning," Maes added. "They also want to
get their projects built faster and get those paying tenants in there."
The Villages at Rio Del Sol is a multi-phased development of upscale homes
being built on land owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.
Morreale said homes in the current phase will be available for sale
before year's end, priced between $600,000 and $1 million. "The response to this has been extremely good," Morreale
said of the new construction technology.
*Article courtesy of Lou Hirsh, who covers business for The Desert Sun.
Glen Ellen
Sunset Magazine wrote an article about a couple from Glen Ellen who designed
and built there own concrete home. They even constructed the doors, concrete
countertops, window bucks, etc. Read
the Article.
Laguna Beach
With highs of 75 degrees in the summer and 65 degrees in the winter, why is a homeowner building with ICFs in Laguna Beach? Ease of construction. This was a homeowner-builder who used general labor to stack and pour the walls, including the gabled ends. The walls went up fast and the job site stayed clean and uncluttered. Having a company rep on site to teach and answer any questions was a great benefit to working with the forms.
 The house is also located in a high seismic area. An engineer, who was a friend of the owners, did some calculations and found that a 4” concrete wall was substantially stronger than the 2x6 framing originally specified.
Another reason for a concrete home in superior soundproofing. Positioned next to a church (bottom right of picture), the homeowner probably wouldn’t want to hear four services a day. ICF systems allow only 1/3 the sound a wood frame wall would.
For more information, contact Ed Bobich or Guy Rosenlof at (800) 266-3676.
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