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Award-Winning Home Designs Remember
the third little pig? He remained safe in his masonry home
while the hungry wolf quickly flattened his brother's straw and
wood-frame structures. Turns out he was
ahead of his time. This month, the National Association of
Home Builders Research Center will announce its third annual Energy
Value Housing Awards, sponsored by the Department of Energy, the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and product
manufacturers. The winners in the Innovative category for hot,
moderate, and cold climates are all built from insulated concrete. Two
of the winners - the Holloway Co. in Iowa Park, Texas, and Dominion
Building Group in Virginia Beach, Virginia - used insulated concrete
forms. These consist of polystyrene panels or blocks; they're
stacked like Legos, then the voids are filled with concrete.
The panels stay in place to form the home's thermal insulation. The
third winner, Tierra Concrete Homes of Pueblo, Colorado, precasts
its walls sections, then trucks them to the site. Company
President Judy Niemeyer says Tierra leaves the interior walls
uninsulated, so that the structure's passive-solar design can take
advantage of the concrete's thermal mass. During the day,
well-places windows soak up solar heat energy, which is absorbed by
the concrete's mass; at night, the concrete reradiates the heat into
the house. While insulated-concrete
technology has been around for more than a decade, Mark Justlin of
the Portland Cement Association stresses that the technology is in
its infancy in terms of use - it commands less than 1 percent of the
market. And most U.C. building codes have only recently
accepted the forms. The award homes'
combination of reduced air infiltration and thermal mass helps lower
heating and cooling costs by 60 to 80 percent. Dominion says
it can downsize furnace and air-conditioner capacities by half when
compared with a wood-frame homes. With their thick, inert
walls, concrete homes are also quieter, don't attract termites, and
have lower fire-insurance premiums. And
they can better withstand the shaking of earthquakes and the huffing
and puffing of hurricane-force winds. CREDIT:
Popular Science. February 1998.
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