In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, Forrest Charnock <fpcharnock@...> wrote:
I certainly was not questioning your skill just pointing out that with a
product like papercrete you can never be sure what you will end up, even
batch to batch.
Forrest, I never thought you were questing my skills, I appreciate the discussion it gets me looking over my own thoughts.
There are sources of rice hulls within a few hundred miles of anywhere in Oklahoma and I sincerely doubt you can do the labor to make all that papercrete for less than the trucking would cost. You could build a couple houses , at least ,with a truck load of hulls and I doubt
you would have more than a grand in all of it.
I'm in far western Oklahoma and believe me the nearest rice farms would be more than 300 miles away and I'm not sure they process the grain there or ship it somewhere else.
I am just going by what I have read but it seems rather labor intensive [PC} and with the drying very time consuming as well.
That is what started me thinking about steam instead of water, that extremely long drying time.
You could also simply hammer mill the paper , mix in borax and fill the
voids that way. It seems you would have better insulation and a lot less
weight to design for. I can see no advantage to papercrete unless it is
structural.
In my opion papercrete would be structural as well as insulation. The factory made SIP's made with EPS are no more structural than papercrete would be, its the OSB that gives the sandwich its strength, the EPS or the Papercrete fills the void and assists with the structural and insulation value of the panels. I don't believe papercrete has nearly the insulation value of EPS but in the right mixture I believe it would beat EPS in strength, as illustrated by Clair with her bullet test.
The rice hulls or the cellulose poured or blown in to the modified stick
frame would be much faster to build and much cheaper and no code problems.
I'm not so sure about code problems with rice hulls, I believe they would be a fire hazard and I personally as a Code Enforcement Offical would never pass on them alone, once the OSB was opened up for any reason it would pour out like sand. Cellulose on the other hand might just pass alone, because once it is blown into a cavity, it packs hard and will not pour out if the OSB has to be opened, as a matter of fact I know it has to be dug out, even if you remove one whole sheet of drywall or OSB which ever is the case, I have had to do it many times in the past while remodeling houses.
When it comes time to resell you would have less need to sell the new owner
on the cellulose or the rice hulls than the PC.
I fell to see the reasoning here. PC should sell itself, if the buyer is aware of its benefits.
I think you just have your heart set on PC and it is your house and your
money so I wish you well.
I think you are extremely correct here, that is why I am in this group of Papercreters.
Thanks for the input, good luck to you
Bob
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