Value Engineering Your New Home

Value Engineering: A Short History

General Electric introduced value engineering to its factories during WWII. Supply shortages during the war forced GE to get creative to meet wartime demand. To their delight, replacement alloys for steel often led to better production at a reduced cost.
These value-engineering campaigns were so successful that GE continued this approach after the war in their commercial lines. Other industries followed suit, and value engineering made it into the home construction industry in the early 1970s.

Value Engineering when dealing with residential home construction is about the same as any other industry.

When you are building a custom home for a client you are going to want to stepback and take a big picture look at the home and what you and the client are attempting to achieve. You want to make sure that the money you spend in one place will pay itself back in the future either through resale or through savings ie: in energy.

For example;

When constructing your new home your home builder will give you the option to adding more insulation into the building envelope. There are all kinds of ways of doing this and they all come with pro's and con's and also with differing price tags. What you and your building need to decide on is how much more do you want to spend on your insulation to save future money on energy use. If you spend the maximum on insulation then you will be saving the maximum amount of money on energy use going into the future. But because you spend a larger portion of money to install all that extra insulation the time that it will take to be paid back to you will be longer. Some options of insulation are so expensive that you will have to look at recouping your loses decades into the future where spending less on the insulation might have a payback of only 5 or 6 years. It all depends on what you are using for energy (gas, propane, electricity) and how you think the overall price of that energy is going to rise and at what rate. If you heat your home with electricity and you believe that the electricity rate is going to climb significantly then you might want to spend a lot more on insulation so that the return is better on your lowered electricity costs. 

All of these choices need to be decided on before you build the entire home, adding in the type of heating system, the positioning of the house on the property, the material that is used to build the house and quality that it is all done will all come in to play when value engineering your new home.

Make sure that you hire a general contractor that can do this for you and you will be able to balance the spending of monies and the savings of monies well into the future.

Rob Abbott

Village Builders Inc.

The energy efficiency of homes in Canada has risen 66% in the last three decades

The energy efficiency of homes in Canada has risen 66% in the last three decades.

The average home built in Canada today is 66% more energy efficient then a home built in the 1970’s.

In the 1970’s there was an energy crisis that forced the construction industry to start looking at the way homes were built and to find ways to make them use less energy allowing average Canadians to afford to heat and cool their homes in the face of sky rocketing heating and cooling costs.

There have been a lot of theories that have come and gone over three decades, some of them good and some of them bad. But as time marched on so did the technology and techniques to make homes use less energy.

One of the biggest changes in construction practices was in stopping the air leakage coming into and out of the home. In the 1970’s the average home when you combined all the cracks, holes and seams together would add up to 350 square inch hole, that is just over a 29 sqft hole. A home built today would have 1/3 the size at around 115 square inches. That alone cuts down on the heat loss that the average home would lose.

The way this has been achieved has more to do with people paying more attention to the little details, in places around windows, doors, window headers, where the foundation meets the stud walls and around electrical penetrations on exterior walls.

The product that helped stop these gaps was foam. There are many different types of foam, from spray foam for the hard to get to areas, to sheets of foam that are attached on the outside of your home. Sheets of foam help stop the transfer of heat through  the wood studs and help block the windchill that cools the inside of the wall cavity down faster, thus making the furnace work harder to warm up the new colder air.

People living in a home today can except to spend almost $1400.00 less on gas to heat their home then the same people living in a home that was built in the 1970’s.

A custom home built by a well qualified builder will have better ratings across the board then these lowering heating loss and heating/cooling costs to near minuscule levels.

So when you are thinking about buying an older home or building a new one, think about the money that you will save in energy consumption with a newly built home. In the long run the new home will pay you back, where the older one will just make you pay.

Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.

Facts from this post where found in the summer 2013 addition of Ontario Home Builder.

Building Insulated Concrete Form custom homes

The evolution of ICF, building custom homes with ICF for over 20 years.

We have been building custom homes for over 30 years and in those thirty years we have strived to separate ourselves from the competition by building better quality and more efficient homes. One of the earliest things that we came to realize is that the easiest way to give our clientele a better home would be to start building a home with a modern foundation.

The drive to give clients a modern foundation led us past cement block or plain poured concrete, it led us to ICF. ICF stands for Insulated Concrete Forms. ICF’s are basically two pieces of polystyrene that are held together with plastic webs creating a cavity in the middle ranging from 4” to 12” depending on the application needed.   The form when installed creates a wall with polystyrene on the inside of the building and the outside of the building. The cavity in the middle is filled with concrete creating a concrete wall with insulation already installed on it.

Once we started installing ICF foundations and saw the benefit to our clientele we started steering more clients to do every floor out of it. This gave them ICF from the foundation all the way to the rafters of the roof.

Even though ICF homes cost more money to build the cost savings that they offered in energy efficiency were well worth it. The feedback that we received over the years helped galvanized the idea of helping people get a better home then just the typical wood walled one.

Over twenty years later we are still building ICF homes. It’s amazing to me how in twenty years the questions are still the same about ICF technology. In the early days people were unsure of the product because it was new, today more than two decades after we started using this product, I can safely say that it is the way that all custom homes should be built.

With all building techniques the product is only as good as the installation and with all building techniques there are tricks that experienced ICF installers will know so that the product works like it is suppose too. After more than two decades of installing this product, Village Builders has it down to an art form. We are able to train our new employee’s from the experiences of our existing employee’s. I have witnessed ICF installations that were done poorly and have even been contracted to fix other contractors mistakes, at no small cost to the homeowner.

The most important thing that you need to do when you are looking for a general contractor to build your custom home is to find out what they are comfortable building. A lot of general contractors do not like building houses out of ICF and will tell you all kinds of pitfalls with the product, this just means that they do not have enough experience with the product. If you want an ICF custom home then you should make sure that you hire a general contractor that will build you an ICF home and is excited to do so. You also want a general contractor that has a lot of experience building ICF homes, this will ensure that you get a home that is not just built out of ICF but built out of the right ICF.

Most people don’t realize that there are over 40 different ICF manufactures in North America alone. Like any product there are good ones and bad ones. No matter how good the installation if the product was a poorly manufactured product will leave you disappointed with the end result. This is another reason that I try to tell people to make sure the general contractor has experience in ICF construction. This will ensure that they know what product works the best and what product will give you what you want. Even though ICF’s are all the same basically in theory, there are a wide variety of ways ICF’s are manufactured so that they are easier to install, cheaper to buy, easier to move, easier to transport or even using different materials other then polystyrene. A lot of these companies come out trying to revolutionize the industry and most of them last for a couple of years and then disappear. It’s usually because either their idea’s ended up being extremely flawed or contractors found them hard to work with costing more time and money. If the product is hard to work with as it pertains to keeping walls straight and level then contractors wouldn’t use them. I have seen this happen to ICF manufactures, instead of re-engineering the product they try to sell it directly to the homeowner as a do-it-yourself project. The end result is always a disaster.

ICF is the next step in house evolution and after two or three decades of use in the custom home industry it’s time that this became the norm and not the option. If you are thinking about building an ICF custom home then you should make sure that you get an ICF general contractor that will give you the high quality that you want and deserve.

Give us a call for your ICF house build or checkout our website at www.villagebuilders.ca

Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.