Polystyrene Cement Board can be used to build floors, walls, and roofs quickly. Panels are prefabricated and transported to assembly site.
linton had previously posted about prefab, green housing. He has seen a lot of “green houses” that seemed, “well… a bit unsafe.”
While there are myths to debunk about sustainable shelter, there also are new methods that can be “secure and green at the same time.”
linton reports on sustainable shelter that is safer than most homes:
“The house walls, floor and roof are made from expanded polystyrene panels cladded with cement board, which fit together without wood framing or braces. The house remained fully intact after being shaken up harder than the strongest recorded earthquake.”
In the United States, a great deal of new housing uses Styrofoam panels. This is applied to a wood frame assembled by carpenters over days, weeks, months… (I see that you have built a new home before.)
Similar to Grancrete construction* that this blog previously reported these new techniques use lightweight aluminum framing. It is good to see positive results from testing since companies that are developing sprayable ceramic shelter have delayed promoting international adoption until further testing of flammability and earthquake resilency.
If such methods are to be adopted throughout the world, then they must meet global criteria for rapid constuction:
- Affordable (No special materials / techniques / licenses / minimum of tools required)
- Comprised of materials that are easy to manufacture, transport, store, and inventory
- Reusable
- Recyclable (Can be safely burned / buried / recycled)
- Repurposable.
- Quick to erect (Learn one, Build one, Teach one)
- Sufficiently large to house typical family, and sufficiently modular so that segments can be combined
- Suited to local climate and expected weather
- Amenable to infrastructure connections (electricity / plumbing / HVAC)
While testing construction materials as to their resitance to fire, earthquake, and other disasters, there are other problems to consider.
- Ventilation is one of the problems associated with any super-tight, super-insulated, green building, such as the pre-fabricated, modular, quick-to-assemble, ceramic-coated Styrofoam shelter developed by the material science group at the Argonne National Laboratory. In particular, the control of humidity can be a problem unless other design factors are employed.
- In addition to the development of advanced energy efficient building materials, there is considerable need for water, sanitation and energy that is affordable, suitable to locale, connectible and capable of independent operation, and environment friendly. Often “green power“, i.e., renewable energy for sustainable shelter, involves a combination of geothermal plus solar, and depending upon the setting, wind, micro-hydro, and combined heat and power.
* Note: The cost of building is several times less expensive than a home built using conventional building materials. According to Gizmag, using conventional techniques, it takes 20 men two weeks to build a house. A five person crew can construct two grancrete homes in one day.
Grancrete is 50 percent sand or sandy soil, 25 percent ash and 25 percent binding material. The binding material is composed of magnesium oxide and potassium phosphate, the latter of which is a biodegradable element in fertilizer. So even if Grancrete were to decompose, he points out, it would revitalize the soil.
Thanks to gnomic of Hugg.
