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A part of the:
Resilience Planning In Design & Construction
- Concrete homes can withstand damaging winds and flying debris better than wood frame homes.
- Concrete is a barrier to rain and flood water, while wood absorbs water and deteriorates.
- Concrete does not burn, unlike the wood frame in traditional home construction.
- Concrete is not organic, so pests such as termites, mold, and dry rot fungi are not problems.
Join us for a tour of Ecocast Homes, a manufacturing plant of precast concrete modular systems, and a beautifully completed four-bedroom, six-thousand foot, custom home built using insulated concrete forms.
Learn to design homes to be built quickly, more resiliently, and still be aesthetically pleasing and style specific. Discover the reasons why concrete is an ideal choice for homeowners, designers, and builders. Whether you’re creating a one-off custom home or a community of builder models, see first hand how you can incorporate modular concrete panels and ICFs into your designs.
Ecocast Homes
Ecocast Homes is located in Humble, Texas and builds beautiful and
affordable precast modular concrete homes in the Greater Houston Area
and Southwest Texas. Their architects, engineers, and project managers have decades of experience in building precast homes in hurricane-prone
coastal regions.
Take a look behind the courtain to see how Ecocast Homes creates beautiful and a great value that requires less time and cost to build while offering many advantages over woodframe construction, usually Completed in less than 60 days.
Although they have model homes available, Ecocast Homes can also supply the concrete “shell” for multiple homes in your development to speed construction and lower costs. They have the ability to adapt your floor plans for use with their concrete forms, finish specifications for various styles, and the adaptability to create innovative partnerships.
Built Using ICFs
The next stop is and awards winning home constructed using Insulated Concrete Forms, and at the time of its construction, the only TRIPLE CERTIFIED (IBHS, USGBC, DOE) house in the country.
The view from the porches span 10-25 miles in certain directions and helps capture the prevailing breezes during hot Texas Summer nights. At night, the stars literally come to you, you don’t have to reach out to them.
Technologies Used:
- The home has solar panels, designed to provide most of the energy during the day.
- Solar thermal, combined with a hybrid/tankless hot water heater from Eternal ensures on demand ultra-high efficiency hot water throughout the home.
- An innovative hybrid water-refrigerant-evaporative HVAC system into the house alongside in-floor radiant heating.
- Rainwater harvesting technology was used to supply the house for 6 weeks, on average.
- A RUUD ‘Smart’ generator was installed that powers the entire house, except some of the peripheral lighting.
- Grace Ice and Water roofing underlayment, rather than the 30 lb roofing felt.
- Low VOC paints, ‘dragon board’ cabinets (which has no volatile ethers), engineered wood floors, and painted doors that are Masonite ‘Safe and Sound’ made of wheat chaff.
Beautifully Designed, Elegantly Executed
This house is designed, first and foremost, to be exactly what it is, a safe comfortable, beautiful home. The design process did not precede or follow the systems approach to the mechanical requirements of the house. Instead, these ideas were integrated and adapted to yield a cohesive, comfortable, safe, efficient, durable, and healthy home. The home was designed to have outstanding resistance to all the maladies that plague the US Gulf Coast.
After The Field Trip
Builder Ker Thomson will be returning with us for lunch where he will be sharing about his 14 month long process examining, in remarkable detail, all the different ways to build a home and roughly 300 different products and technologies from which a house can be constructed. He looked at at least 7 different wall systems and we will be learning how and why he came to choose ICF.