One very cold day, Mark Andrzejewski was inside a house that was under construction. He noticed something that struck him as odd: He wasn’t cold.
“It was in the middle of February,” he recalls. “At night the temperature outside was about 10, and in the daytime, it was about 18. The guys were installing the drywall. There was no furnace. But inside the house, it was about 64 degrees.”
He says the house was warm because its foundation and walls had been constructed with insulating concrete forms (ICFs), a building system touted for its energy-conserving properties. Often likened to ice cream sandwiches, ICFs are poured concrete surrounded by rigid plastic foam insulation, which not only gives the structure energy efficiency, but also makes the place quieter. They’ve also been praised for their resistance to high winds and fire.
Even though ICFs sound like a near-perfect building system, they haven’t exactly taken the country by storm, for a number of reasons. But Andrzejewski was sold.
His own Chicago-based firm, MAR Builders, is now in the midst of constructing a small development in Palatine. When complete, Mark’s Landing will consist of seven homes built with ICFs, priced from about $450,000 to $500,000.
Until recently, anything resembling a “subdivision” built with ICFs, such as the one in Palatine, was a complete rarity. But lately, Chicago is starting to see some more extensive ICF undertakings. If not outright subdivisions, they amount to clusters of building activity. Some examples:
In the city, Robert Anderson’s company, Chicago Building Systems, is building 34 single-family ICF homes near Midway Airport, and plans to build 20 ICF homes in Humboldt Park and 16 more near Comiskey Park.
Monterrey Contractors of Chicago has begun a project called Mohawk North, which will consist of five ICF three-flats on the 1400 block of North Mohawk Street. Of the 15 condo units, seven will be sold at market rates, five will be sold to the Chicago Housing Authority for occupancy by CHA tenants, and three will be sold in “an affordable range, to people of moderate income” according to Monterrey partner Jeff Welsh.
And, dotted across the Chicago landscape are custom homes by such builders as Tom Hanley, whose firm, Energy Block Corp. of Streamwood, started out as a distributor of a line of ICF products. Gradually, he branched into the construction business.
Hanley said he made the switch because he was so frustrated by the lack of recognition his product was getting. “My original thought when I started out was that we would be selling this thing to builders, but I ran into such a roadblock that I was forced into getting our own crews and putting up the houses ourselves. It was a blessing, because we learned so much,” he says.
Hanley is right: ICFs are hardly a household word among home buyers because they traditionally have made up a tiny portion of the new-home market. That may be changing, though no one is using the term “revolution.”
The Portland Cement Association, a trade group in Skokie that promotes concrete construction, estimates that in 1998, ICFs were used in 1.7 percent of all new homes, which is, by any measure, a tiny slice of a booming market. However, the group points out that the 1998 figures represented a 70 percent jump over the year before, and it projects that by the middle of the next decade ICFs will claim 12.5 percent of the whole market.
The PCA and builders cite a couple of reasons for such optimism, one of them being that the concrete industry and manufacturers of ICF forms have set out to market the material more aggressively, from conducting seminars for builders to erecting demonstration houses for the perusal of industry and public.
But the bottom line is, essentially, the bottom line in ICFs’ increasing popularity. A few years ago, ICF manufacturers and builders tended to say that ICF homes cost slightly more to construct than the traditional “stick-built” frame home, though they reassured consumers that the cost difference would me made up in energy savings.
But because lumber costs have skyrocketed in the last two years, the playing field is becoming more level, ICF proponents say.
“We used to be 4 percent higher with this product,” according to Hanley. “Fortunately for us, lumber prices have increased in the past two years, so now we are pretty compatible (to stick-built homes) with cost.”
Robert Anderson, who is building the houses in various city neighborhoods, also is past president of the Automated Builders Consortium, a building trade group in Buffalo Grove.
“I’ve compared (ICF) basements as well as whole houses across 14 systems. In general, once you’re in a home larger than 1,200 square feet, the ICF system is at or less than the cost of the conventionally built home,” he says.
The National Association of Home Builders Research Center in Maryland, which tests building materials and methods, confirms that costs tend to decrease as builders gain more experience, and counsels neophytes to expect higher-than-anticipated costs on their first three or four houses. Research Center literature confirms that once the construction crews have had a few hours of instruction on the specifics of building with ICFs, wall construction typically turns out to take about the same time as wood-framed wall construction.
But the learning curve isn’t limited to the trades, it warns: There’s likely to be a cost involved, if only in time spent, in educating engineers, architects and code officials. Andrzejewski said that although he has found the building code officials in Palatine to be particularly cooperative, he recently talked to a builder who said that code officials in other areas were unfamiliar with ICFs and skeptical of approving his plans.
Others caution builders to expect resistance from some trade unions unfamiliar with the methods used to erect ICF homes and resistant to working on jobs that may require fewer highly skilled workers, or at least fewer hours on the job.
Industry studies tend to confirm that ICFs do have energy-saving properties. The NAHB Research Center reports that ICF walls provide lower air-infiltration and higher R-values (a measure of insulating properties) than typical wood-frame construction. The group suggests that ICFs’ R-values range from R-17 to R-26 and typical wood-frame homes range from R-13 to R-19.
The group also reports on one study of 26 pairs of similar houses in the same climates that were compared for their energy use. Overall, it found that the combined heating and cooling cost savings there averaged 21 percent.
Hanley takes it a lot further. “Our literature says we will save 68 percent on energy bills. We built a 4,800-square-foot house in Carpentersville, and we saw the bills every month. The biggest heating bill they had all winter (a year ago) was $48. The biggest air-conditioning bill they had through July was $15.”
Andrzejewski agrees that he has seen a lot of interest in energy savings from potential buyers, but also says that noise reduction matters a lot to them. He says there’s a fair amount of auto traffic going past his development at Quentin and Dundee Roads, but you wouldn’t know it from inside the houses.
“I’m not sure which (advantages) hit with the buying public,” says Monterrey’s Welsh. “We certainly promote the energy efficiency, because that’s a specialty of our company.”
But he says that in the current market, energy efficiency doesn’t top the buyers’ wish lists. “First and foremost, people focus on how the place looks — the kitchen layout, how big are the closets — that’s what drives them.
“But I do see a shift (toward ICFs) ultimately,” Welsh says. “It’s going to take education and exposure, more demand from the consumer.”
Put simply, he says it might take an energy crisis. “Let me tell you, that would be a kick in the pants.”
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