[papercreters] Re: pole barn (house) construction with PC infill

Pouring wet or damp papercrete into ICF forms would cause a great many problems.

The papercrete would have great difficulty drying. Remember, papercrete is not concrete. Papercrete does not harden cure chemically as much as it dehydrates by evaporation, allowing the paper fibers to stiffen.

Polystyrene ICFs, the industry standard for ICFs simply would not allow enough air circulation and water evaporation around the papercrete inside.

If you want to pour papercrete into formwork, I suggest slipforms, full height forms, or even hiperpapercrete. These allow more air circulation and better drying.


henradio wrote:===================

This discussion reminds me of another building technique - Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF). This typically uses foam plastic forms with cross ties and rebar as part of the assembly before concrete is poured in. There was some mention on the papercrete yahoo group in Sept of 2007 - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/papercreters/message/4166 . But the discussion was more in terms of making the forms from papercrete.
Has anyone tried using papercrete in place of regular concrete with the ICF forms? Guess you would have to use the stem wall for ground moisture isolation and figure out how to allow drainage when you add the papercrete. It would probably have good insulation and moisture control from the inside and outside. (And not likely to be the inexpensive solution Overogypsy is seeking.) But it might be an interesting variation on typical ICF, papercrete could be less expensive than concrete to fill the forms, and combining with the post and beam construction might address the structural strength issues arising from using papercrete instead of concrete.




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