Stage 1 Photos

Another vote here for not so young and fit. Sunday was basically a write-off due to some very cranky discs in my lower back.

After a slow start, we got quite a bit done. The day began at the Enviro Shop picking up a load of pallets to go with the loot I scored at the Outlook shop. After getting all the tools together, Matt and I cut the aluminium profiles to size for the window frames:



The pallets we salvaged varied greatly in terms of the quality of the timber. We spent a fait bit of time breaking them down into the individual pieces of timber. While some of the pallets came apart really easily, others were nailed together pretty solidly. We also ran into ab bit of trouble cutting and nailing wood with stubborn nails still embedded.





We're using aluminium foil to represent sarking on our wall:



and as Glenn said, our frame is somewhat overengineered, but we had the timber...



After a slow start and a long day, we finished up just after dark with a partly clad frame.



Stand by for the last phase of construction (finishing off the window, cladding and roof) and our test. More photos from Saturday can be found on our Twitter feed in the bar to the right.

Construction - Stage 1

Well yesterday's construction adventure was educational, with the most obvious lesson today being that two years of being deskbound followed by a year and a half of being a student means I am no longer as young or as fit as I used to be. My old work pants don't fit quite as well either.

  We have added another layer of challenge to our project, attempting to use an absolute minimum of new materials, scrounging whatever we can while still producing a structurally sound and hopefully attractive result. We figure this is both environmentally better, minimising the embodied energy of our short-term project, as well as an investigation into the pitfalls of using recycled materials. It also helps the budget when you're an impoverished student..
  George hit the Tip Shop and scored some nice bits of wood and sheets of roofing, also providing some bricks from a stash at home. Matt sourced a 2nd hand window, but it proved too big for our purposes in the end. We raided the back of the Enviro Shop for some pallets and other waste materials. (even better, they were used for shipping solar grid connect inverters and as most shipping companies actually refuse to take back pallets these days, they were destined for disposal soon) While these materials are perhaps more suited for building a shanty town in a dystopian future, using actual structural grade recycled materials can only be easier than this....

  We started with trimming up some offcuts of aluminium solar panel mounting rails to make a resonable simulation of a window frame. I finally achieved a long-held desire of having a legitimate excuse for buying a wrecking bar and we proceeded to dismantle the pallets and recover the wood and nails. Our fears proved correct, none of the timbers were straight or consistent in any dimension and the hardness grades of wood varied from balsa to ironbark within the one pallet. There were also at least two different sizes of brick, with one type being around 10mm shorter than a standard brick. We decided not to use mortar for this project, again reducing embodied energy and making it easy for cleanup and recycling afterwards. The wall is small enough to be stable and structurally sound without mortar.

 Our frame design is waaay overengineered for a wall of this scale, but we decided to do it properly and put in all of the usual studs, noggings, lintel etc as a learning experience. An unexpected realisation is that because the internal wall is provided by the bricks you can get away with a lot of warping in the wall framing as there is no flat surface required for plaster fixing, especially if you are using a flexible outer skin that can handle a bit of 'character' such as radial sawn weatherboards or a vertical ship-lap style timber cladding in our case. This means you can use timber that would otherwise not be considered suitable for framing, meaning more efficient use of resources and hopefully some cost savings.

  So far it has all been hand tools and the only new materials used have been two nails (a particularly hard piece of wood meets bent nails = more bent nails) and the tinfoil. We didn't even use any artificial lighting until the last half hour or so. The wall frame and cladding is sorted, roof structure is cut and ready, next time we install and detail the window and assemble the structure then move onto testing. George will be posting the photos soon..

  Glenn

Materials

To be a viable material in a reverse veneer construction the masonry component must have a high thermal mass allowing heat to be stored and exerted at the most effective times to ensure that a constant temperature is established and easily maintained in an interior space.

Green energy bricks – green energy bricks are a relatively new material on the market and, like all new materials, bold claims of high performance ensue.

· Website http://www.greenenergybricks.com.au/

· Embodied energy – no information is advertised on there website, immediately implying that the embodied energy is high.

· Recyclability – the ability of polyisocyanurate to be recycled is relatively unproven

· Labour costs – green energy bricks are very easy to build with, they require no mortar, take up the same vertical and horizontal space as around 8 bricks and only weigh 2.7 Kg. They are also far lighter in terms of volume: mass making them easier to manoeuvre on a building site.

· Insulation qualities – green energy bricks have an amazing R8+ insulation rating. Considering that 60% of heat is lost in the average house through badly insulated walls and single glazed windows (35% and 25% respectively), the insulation qualities of a particular material is very important in terms of sustainable design

· Practicality in terms of reverse brick veneer – although green energy bricks achieve a very high level of insulation, if used in a veneer situation the wall thickness for exterior walls becomes a hindrance. The green energy brick itself is 320mm wide, combine that with a 40mm cavity 90mm stud work 10mm of plaster board and 40mm of cladding the overall thickness of an exterior wall ends up being around 500mm thick. In most residential cases this is a gross amount of area wasted on wall space, either detracting from room sizes, or adding to the buildings footprint. Green energy bricks are designed to be used as a standalone walling system. Although green energy bricks have a high insulation rating, they are not effective when trying to use them as a thermal mass. A reverse brick veneer wall requires the inner layer of masonry to store heat and exert at the most effective times . see http://www.brick.org.uk/_media/_images/about/aboutus-graph.jpg

Geobricks – Geobricks are a rammed earth, air dried bricks consisting of only 4% cement

· Website http://www.geobrick.com.au/geobrick.html

· Embodied energy – at least 2-6 tonnes less carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) on every new home compared to kiln fired solid bricks http://www.geobrick.com.au/co2-savings.html

· Recyclability – if care is taken in the demolition process, geobricks can be successfully salvaged and reused in new builds.

· Labour costs – the construction process is much the same as traditional kiln fire brickwork however the production is much more time consuming due to the fact that each brick is air dried rather than kiln fired

· Insulation qualities – geo bricks act very similarly to kiln fired brickwork in terms of insulation. R0.078

· Practicality in terms of reverse brick veneer – geobricks have the same level of practicality as kiln fired bricks in all areas except monitory.

Concrete blocks

· Website – http://www.boral.com.au/concreteblocks/concreteblocks.asp

· Embodied energy – concrete blocks are (obviously) made of concrete., which is one the leading producers CO2, accounting for 5% of the total CO2 produced by man. Concrete blocks also require mortar at every joint, contributing in the amount of cement needed in the construction process

· Recyclability – if properly demolished concrete blocks can be salvaged from buildings being knocked down and reused in new builds. Concrete blocks can also be ground down and used as an aggregate to new builds

· Labour costs – concrete block construction is relatively fast compared to clay bricks. This can be attributed to the larger size of the brick, meaning less bricks have to be physically laid to cover the same volume as clay bricks.

· Insulation qualities – R0.19

· Practicality in terms of reverse brick veneer – concrete blocks face the same problems as green energy bricks, they are vastly wider that traditional clay bricks causing impractical wall thickness when used in a veneer situation.

Traditional kiln fired clay bricks

· Website - http://www.australbricks.com.au/ , http://www.boral.com.au/ , http://www.fultonbrickyard.com.au/ , http://www.mdbrick.com.au/ for recycled bricks visit http://www.beaverbricks.com.au/ , http://www.paddysbricks.com.au/

· Embodied energy – traditional clay brick require kiln firing, (a kiln furnace is heated to around 1280˚C degrees and the clay is burned into a useable solid state). Heating this kiln requires massive amounts of energy.

· Recyclability – if care is taken during the demolishing of brick buildings, clay bricks can be washed and reused in new builds. However due to poorly constituted law, in the process of demolishing a buildings, (unlike most countries throughout Europe) you are in no way compelled (apart from having moral issues with the wastage of building materials) to conserve bricks so that they can be re-used. This is why one factor of brickwork being a large contributor to Australian landfill.

· labour cost – laying bricks is a very time consuming task due to the fact that every brick must be individually laid

· Insulation qualities – traditional clay bricks, by themselves have an R0.078 insulation rating, They are usually used in conjunction with a third party insulator and a stud frame.

· practicality in terms of reverse brick veneer – when reverse brick veneer is mentioned kiln fired clay bricks are generally implied as part of the process

I’m currently researching a few more materials that could be used for the cladding and masonry component of reverse brick veneer. I’ll post them up shortly

matt

Some Sketchup Sketches

One major factor with the non-standard wall structure is where to position the windows, inner wall or outer wall?

In the following series of sketches the window is shown in inner, middle and outer positions from the interior and exterior, demonstrating the different practical and aesthetic aspects.

 

 My preference is for the window to be mounted to the outer wall. This gives less framing exposed to the weather, a handy window shelf inside and looks better to my eye. Mounting the window to the interior gives better window shading though, beneficial if eaves are a problem (e.g. ground floor of a two storey house)

The whole effect is taken even further when a 50mm cavity is introduced between the brick and structural walls.

 

The following are just a few sketches of the proposed model.

 

 More details to come soon...


Glenn