Insulating concrete forms may be more widely used in commercial than in residential building, but that doesn’t mean interest on the part of production homebuilders isn’t picking up.

Homecrete Homes, which builds in Florida and in Kern County, Calif., built 150 homes in Bakersfield and used ICFs for an entire subdivision.

Steve Reiter, vice president of marketing for Greenblock Inc., says this is hardly a unique case. The company is getting "a whole lot of interest” from large, well-known production builders such as Lennar and Pulte.

For any builder who is interested in qualifying for LEED certification, ICFs offer a heaping helping: He or she can earn as many as 20 LEED points by building with ICFs.

There are other reasons for builders to consider ICFs. As Greenblock points out on its website, a sharp increase in the cost of lumber is spurring interest in alternative building materials. ICF manufacturers are less affected by fluctuations in the cost of raw materials.

With a practiced crew, labor costs come down, too.

Therein lies the barrier to sales for ICFs, Reiter says. "The guy is comfortable with what he is already doing, and he doesn’t want to take the time to learn a new system. Greenblock tries to remove that barrier by offering our own professional installation company. We can also train his crew to build with ICFs. We’ll do anything the builder wants.”

As indoor air quality takes on increasing importance, builders may want to give ICFs more attention. The foam used in ICFs does not offgas, nor does it promote mold growth, Reiter says. Also, a home built with ICFs bars the airborne allergens that may get into a stick-frame house.

A boon to the ICF industry on the commercial side is the move by some state and city jurisdictions requiring that any commercial structure over 10,000 square feet meet certain energy-efficient standards.

"We see this as a great way for the industry to grow, when we have legislative mandates for commercial construction,” Reiter says.

Stronger ICFs Muscle into Market

ICFs are a stout building material, able to withstand much of the punishment Mother Nature puts out in her fouler moods, but Formtech has given its product even more oomph over the past few months.

The company has revamped the cavity webs in its ICFs to increase strength and include built-in rebar clips, making rebar installation faster and easier. The clips reduce the need to tie steel while providing consistent rebar placement.

Formtech produces a variety of cavity widths—4-, 6-, 8- and 10-inch sizes. The webs are self-locking, and their open design allows for proper consolidation while concrete is being poured. A special web extender can create 12-, 14-, 16-, 18- and 20-inch cavities.

Reversible, interlocking tread offers versatility and performance and eases installation. Formtech features 8-inch on-center polypropylene furring strips for interior and exterior attachments.

Frank Bentley, director of sales for Formtech International (a sub-brand of Tegrant Corp.’s Building Products Group), says multistory construction with ICFs is growing in popularity. "Speed of construction, soundproofing and energy savings, and reduced utility costs are all aspects that are very appealing to today’s builders and consumers,” he says.

Wade Vernon, a distributor for the Perform Wall ICF, sees growing interest among builders. Perform Wall is a composite ICF, 85 percent recycled styrofoam (the company takes all of the packaging material Sony uses to pack its products) by volume and 15 percent cement. The composition means that the product won’t sustain flame or spread smoke, Vernon says.

Another advantage of composites is that because they tend to weigh more than typical ICFs, they tend to stay in place and don’t need as much bracing when the builder is stacking walls. "The weight of the form tends to hold it in place, and so the builder has an easier time pouring a true and straight plumb wall,” Vernon says.

ICF Industry Weighing in on Green Standard

The Insulating Concrete Form Association is helping to shape an NAHB/ANSI Green Built standard. Vera Novak, ICFA technical services manager, was chosen as part of the energy task force that is developing the standard. Novak expects that builders eventually will be able to choose from either a prescriptive- or performance-based path to meet the standard, which mirrors that of EPA’s Energy Star code.

"Builders have been clamoring for this and will adopt this,” says Vera Novak, technical services manager of the ICFA. "So we have a huge market to distribute the information.”

Builders will learn more about ICFs and the technology’s role in energy savings if they attend ICFA’s annual meeting and expo in St. Louis Sept. 24-26.

Sam Rashkin, national director of EPA’s Energy Star program, is scheduled to speak at the meeting. He’ll be talking about how ICFs contribute to an Energy Star designation. The meeting also has slated two sessions on building science, the first time it has approached the topic at an ICFA conference. "We’re bringing it to the industry so builders can apply it,” Novak says.

Builders might want to take advantage of those sessions (nonmembers as well as members may attend), because ICFs are taking a greater share of the building materials market, up to almost 6 percent in 2006. ICFs are the fastest-growing building materials in the residential construction segment of the construction industry today, says Novak.

"There’s a lot of uptake in condos, apartments, retirement living—anything that requires sound and fire partitions in the building,” she says. "Construction technology has advanced to include either cast-in-place or precast concrete floors in combination with ICF walls for very speedy construction.”

A market for add-ons with ICFs also is developing, Novak says, because it is easy to tie ICFs into an existing structure.

Registration for ICFA’s September conference can be done at the association’s website, forms.org.