Papercreters: [papercreters] Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC vs Papercrete -was- Re: Greetings

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

[papercreters] Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC vs Papercrete -was- Re: Greetings

From the beginning of my project I was facing some challenges.
First, since the house was 22 feet high on one end made it necessary to build a post and
beam infrastructure, which was a departure from the original plan.
A friend of mine, whom has an engineering background, did the designing and building
of the steel structure that was "in filled" with papercrete.
Since papercrete was new to him, as it was for all but one person on the crew, a lot of
improvising and on site engineering had to be done.
One of the things we ended up with were cross supports made from 1 1/2 inch square
steel tubing. Unfortunately, they way they ended up in the walls created a challenge to put
the blocks around and later a big hassle for plumbing and electrical.
The people doing the plumbing and electrical had no experience with papercrete and were
pretty much on their own. When they got frustrated, instead of paitently cutting away and
trenching, ended up hacking away with claw hammers, creating sometimes massive
trenches and holes to deal with.
In the kitchen, when they were sweating the pipes, they started a smoldering fire that we
weren't aware of for several days.
One of the laborers was sweeping up and noticed the wall was hot, and I realized it was on
fire.
Needless to say I freaked, and we began hacking away at the fire. The more air that got to
it, the more it smoldered.Another demonstration of how inadequate blocks can be
dangerous.
The hole we hacked away was only about 3 feet in diameter, but would have spread
through out the entire wall if it hadn't been discovered that soon.
It had been burning for three days though, so considering if it had been a frame house the
entire house would have burned down in a matter of a half hour.
As for the plumbing over all, they pretty much did a hack job and that was one of the
things I was faced with trying to cover up.
The wiring was another fiasco. Since the house had vaulted ceilings, ideally all the wiring
should have been put in the ceiling, betweet tne t & g and the steel panels.
Since it wasn't planned properly, the BX wire ended up on the edge of the vigas and glue
lam beam. Quite tacky looking from my point of view, but no one seemed to care much
about finding a way to remedy the situation.
So, there was plenty of blaming and finger pointing going around, none of which solved
anything. I could go on and on about the crappy workmanship, but it serves no purpose
and just aggravates me.
So, yes some of the problems are attributed to bad blocks, some to bad design, some to
poor workmanship.
Would a stick house be any different? Probably, since everything is more even and semetric
and the wiring can be placed easily in the studs.
I found that much of the ease of construction associated with papercrete is really
dependent on a lot of factors and is not necessarily a "no brainer".
I plan to create a DVD of this project as soon as I am moved and settled in to my new
rental place, so hopefully by mid fall I'll have something to show everyone.
Meantime, I hope I at least answered some of your questions.
Ed