High-Performance ICF Homes
Need To Know Facts
Whether you’re building a home that’s large or small, or living in the cooler North or warmer South, when you build a Element ICF home, you’ll get a stronger, more resilient and more energy-efficient home that will significantly reduce your consumption of natural resources while surrounding your family with unsurpassed comfort and safety.
Virtually any home design can be built with Element ICF. Most full-height Element ICF homes are built with our 6 inch or 8 inch concrete core thickness. Larger homes and heavier loading may require wider concrete cores.
Element offers engineering tables and the online One Minute Engineer. Both resources comply with prevailing and accepted concrete design standards and conventions. Element prescriptive engineering covers a wide range of typical residential applications and thus for many Element ICF homes additional site specific engineering is not required to obtain a building permit.
Your home’s effective thermal performance will be enhanced by the 5 day thermal lag provided by the high-mass concrete core in the Element ICF exterior walls.
And finally, due to the monolithic nature of Element ICF construction, your home will be inherently air-tight. In fact, 9 of the most common 19 air-leakage trouble spots shown below are inherently solved by regular Element ICF construction. And the remaining 10 air-leakage trouble spots are addressed by incremental construction techniques listed in the High Performance Homes application page.
So How Much Does A High-Performance Element ICF Home Cost Compared To A Regular Wood-Framed Home?
Every home, homeowner, builder and region are different and there are many variables in play that make it difficult to arrive at a consistently accurate rule of thumb. But here is an example that illustrates the general economics of Element, given typical lumber prices and interest rates.
Below grade, the cost of Element ICF construction should be similar to the cost of a framed-out and well insulated conventional foundation.
Above grade, let’s assume the cost of an unfinished Element ICF wall can cost in the range of of $6 – $9 more per square foot than an ordinary 2×6 stick-framed wall.
And for this example let’s take a bungalow with 2,000 sq ft of living space that has 1,800 sq ft of above grade walls.
- $200/sq ft – Turnkey budget price to build this home conventionally with a framed-out and well insulated conventional foundation.
- $400,000 – Budget price for the turnkey conventional build (assume $200 sq ft x 2,000 sq ft of floor area).
- $14,400 – Additional cost to build the above grade walls with Element ICF (assume $8/sf ft premium x 1,800 sq ft of above grade wall area).
- 3.6% – Cost premium to build with Element ICF ($414,400 – $400,000)/$400,000.
- $90.94 – Additional mortgage payment to finance $14,400
In this case, if your total heating, cooling, insurance and maintenance savings exceed $91/mth, then building with Element ICF will actually save you money every month.
Plus, the cost of framing lumber is FAR more volatile than ICF pricing and when the cost of lumber spikes, as it did in spring 2018, summer 2020 and again in spring 2021, the cost of regular wood-frame walls will actually approach and can exceed the cost of higher-performance Element ICF walls.
