Once in a while natural disasters come around and we get an amazing story from an insulated concrete form homeowner. Usually its stories about the homes surviving tornadoes and turning their cheeks to hurricanes- saving family and friends while reducing damage to irreplaceable possessions. This time however is a story of the immense confidence and peace of mind having a concrete home can give a homeowner under dire circumstances.

Over the last few weeks areas in Colorado have been riddled with major wild fires. The fires would go up the mountain and destroy everything in its path, entire neighborhoods, acres of wildlife and vegetation…but not P. Brady’s Reward concrete home. You may recognize the house from a previous post on insulated concrete forms in Colorado. He was able to hunker down and protect his land and home from the flames with a couple garden hoses, with help from his son and his previous fire mitigation techniques.

Below is the video from the local news station.

Once in awhile an opportunity comes up where we can get our product on TV. It worked out at the end of the year in 2009 to partner with Hometime on PBS, as they planned to build the foundation of a beautiful home out of ICFs just outside of Minneapolis. The show also teamed up with Cemstone, and their pretty blue trucks, in Minnesota for the concrete placement.

Below is the show broken into 5 parts, for ease of downloading. If you would like to request a full version to use for your home shows involving Reward please contact us and we will see what we can do.

I got rid of the embedded players, so to view videos they will download and start when you click a link. Files sizes range from 5mb to 10mb, so please be patient.

ICFs on Hometime Part 1

ICFs on Hometime Part 2

ICFs on Hometime Part 3

ICFs on Hometime Part 4

ICFs on Hometime Part 5

We recently visited a jobsite last week in Michigan and was able to catch on video the ICF install crew, of ICF Building Solutions, accepting a truckload of Reward ICFs on the jobsite. We thought it would be interesting to share to help conceptualize with people who have never worked with our ICF, how lightweight they are. It surprises some people because of the strength and all of the benefits of ICFs, they expect something that must weigh a ton.

That was the old way to build. This is the smarter way, the sustainable way. Why risk injury lifting CMU or spending more money bringing in extra unloading equipment? There’s no more need struggling to carry large pieces of lumber in order to erect the walls.

Reward’s  insulating concrete forms weigh approximately 5.5 pounds a piece. That’s about as much as a full grown Chihuahua. So when the crew is unloading and stacking, it’s like lifting chihuahuas all day long, only without the barking and biting of the ankles! The square footage of one of our forms is equal to 6 CMU blocks, so really that’s 5.5 pounds versus 120 pounds for the same amount of wall area.

Are you starting to see some efficiencies of ICFs?

So here is the video we took. The ICF install crew unloaded 50 cubes of our 17″ iForm, enough for 3,000 square feet of wall. Each cube weighs around 60 pounds. To put that in perspective you would need over 3,400 CMU blocks weighing in at over 20 pounds a piece, to put up that same amount of wall. All this was done in 20 minutes as well.

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