TC Legend is pleased to announce we will train SIPs installers & ICF installers this summer through winter!
Training will take place at our sites in and around Bellingham, WA.
Places are limited as we only have six houses left to build this year and four of them have foundations poured already, none have the SIPs erected. So be quick to claim your spot!
Folks who are interested should have a minimum of (2) years framing experience for SIPs, and (2) years concrete foundation work experience for ICF.
The purpose of these trainings is to increase the number of capable SIPs & ICF installers.
TC Legend has a growing plans-for-sale business which will design & permit many new houses in the Pacific Northwest, and these plans (with permits) could be built by the newly trained installers.
Cost for the training will be $175/ day.
SIPS Training: (4) days for SIPs (3 days of walls, 1 of roof).
ICF Training: (3) days for ICF.
We encourage established contractors to contact us!
Please contact Nicole for more info on training dates and to claim your spot: nicole@tclegendhomes.com
For the first time in over 10 years, TC Legend Homes has had the opportunity to build our very own spec home!
We are excited to announce that it will be completed and ready to sell within a couple weeks’ time!
This lovely forest bungalow located in Sudden Valley, named Cascade, features our typical SIPs and ICF construction, energy efficient techniques and solar array creating a Net-Zero house that can also power an electric vehicle.
It has 1400 square feet of living space and a 240 square foot garage, with a total of 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.
The extra-large bridge driveway can park an additional 3-4 cars or has ample room to work and play!
As always, this home is heated by a Chiltrix CX34 air-to-water heat pump and two fan coil units for added comfort. The heat pump also provides air conditioning in tandem with the Fantech Hero 250H-EC heat recovery ventilator (HRV). The envelope is vapor sealed and the window are triple paned with Low-E coatings for extra energy efficiency.
For superior indoor air quality, Cascade features an HRV system with added HEPA filters, low/no VOC finishes throughout, FloorScore rated solid bamboo floors, and all electric appliances and heating.
We anticipate Cascade to perform exceptionally well like all of our other homes and obtain Built Green 4-Star rating, EPA Indoor AirPLUS certification, EPA Energy Star certification and Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready Home rating.
So far, the house has received a 0.45 air changes per hour envelope seal, which far exceeds the Passivehaus standard.
Other home details include, EnergyStar rated appliances, induction cooktop, WaterSense rated plumbing fixtures, zero-threshold shower on main floor, tub/shower combo on lower level, lots of natural daylight, south facing windows, solid bamboo flooring throughout, bright white interior, locally milled raw edge cedar plank on the driveway railing, asphalt roofing, cedar plank entry accent siding, tile entry, tile bathrooms, river rock tile shower floor, exposed beams, vaulted ceilings, heat pump dryer.
If you are interested in purchasing or touring Cascade, please reach out to us to through the “Contact Us” page on our website or keep watch for our Redfin/Zillow/Trulia ad which will release in the next couple of weeks!
** Update 7/21/22 : This just in! Cascade is up on the market! Check out the Redfin ad HERE to book your tour today! **
Impact of Eco-Conscious Living Series: Indoor Air Quality
Just as you may think about the poor outdoor air quality on a smoky day or the smog that surrounds large cities, every building has its own body of air with varying degrees of quality and pollution that make up the indoor air quality (IAQ). IAQ is incredibly important for your own health and is, unfortunately, frequently under accounted for by mainstream building practices. It is, however, an attribute of eco-conscious building techniques for its impact on human and animal health, interlinked outcome of house longevity, and subsequent decrease in environmental footprint.
Taking a deeper dive into what IAQ actually is, IAQ can be anything from biological pollutants such as mold and mildew, bacteria, dust or pollen, to carbon monoxide or volatile organic compounds (VOC’s)5. Each pollutant effects humans, animals and the environment differently and the effects on humans can also vary depending on personal sensitivities. Exposure to just biological pollutant could lead to “skin irritation, sneezing, watery eyes, coughing, shortness of breath, dizziness, lethargy, fever, and digestive problems”1. Other pollutants, such as VOC’s, can cause more severe symptoms such as “eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches, loss of coordination and nausea, damage to liver, kidney and central nervous system,” with some VOC’s known or suspected to even cause cancer in humans or animals6. For information about all the individual indoor pollutants and their sources, visit https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/indoor-pollutants-and-sources.
Many of these pollutants are unavoidable as they can occur naturally, but we can take steps to reduce them to levels that will be less harmful or eliminate them almost entirely. If you hire TC Legend Homes, then before you even step into your house, we have already been working on increasing your home’s IAQ by using low toxicity products such as SIPs, low/zero VOC paints and finishes, low toxicity flooring and more. The SIPs we use eliminate the ozone depleting chemicals HCFCs and CFCs, as well as reduce moisture in between the walls that lead to mold growth.2 This, accompanied by the superior heating and ventilation installed, will set your home up for much healthier air. The next blog post in this series will discuss the details of ventilation and its impact.
Once moved into your new home, it is still important to take daily steps to maintain a healthier IAQ. Be sure to vacuum and dust regularly, clean fabric items frequently, reduce household clutter3, avoid harsh cleaning products, maintain a lower humidity level, repair leaks, run your exhaust fan during and after showering, maintain your ventilation system and change the filters frequently4.
Many eco-conscious building methods and results are interconnected, including IAQ, house longevity and environmental footprint. The nature of obtaining and maintaining good IAQ, means ensuring your home is being fixed of any issues which will result in the deterioration of your home and therefore cause indoor pollutants such as mold and mildew. Immediately fixing smaller issues that come up, like leaks or a filter in need of changing, will decrease the likelihood of the issues becoming so large that it is irreversible or will require more replacements to the system or surrounding area in the future. To this same note, upkeeping your home regularly and fixing issues as soon as they turn up, means using less resources in the long run, as replacement will be less frequent. As we know, using less resources helps to lower your overall carbon footprint. Moreover, maintaining good IAQ requires use of less toxic materials including those containing toxins and pollutants that are harmful to the environment such as greenhouse gases like VOCs or potent chemicals like pesticides. This in turn reduces the negative impact on the environment.
Taking all these steps to obtain and maintain your IAQ, will not only help you and your family’s health, but help reduce pollution outdoors and increase the longevity of your home.
Want to learn more about how smoke affects indoor air quality? Check out EPA Indoor Air Quality information and their recommendations for wildfire season HERE
Written by: Nicole Miller
Sources:
1“Biological Pollutants’ Impact on Indoor Air Quality.” United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EPA.gov, https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/biological-pollutants-impact-indoor-air-quality. 2/10/2022.
2“Building With Sips Creates Healthier, More Comfortable Interiors.” Insulspan, https://www.insulspan.com/advantages/health-comfort/. 3/2/2022.
3“Easy ways you can improve indoor air quality.” Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/easy-ways-you-can-improve-indoor-air-quality. 2/10/2022.
6“Volatile Organic Compounds’ Impact on Indoor Air Quality.” United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EPA.gov, https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/volatile-organic-compounds-impact-indoor-air-quality. 2/10/2022.
SIPs are wall, roof (and sometimes floor) panels. Fabricated from a slab of foam sandwiched between two plywood sheets. Actually, it’s not ply it’s OSB (oriented strand board).
The sandwich-panels can be up to 24’x8’ and are made in the SIPs factory, in our case Premiere-SIPs in Puyallup. The doors and windows are cut-out in the factory, a stack of pre-fabricated house panels are loaded onto a trailer and arrives on-site where the SIPs are assembled… a bit like Legos.
Because TC Legend Builds affordable Net Zero energy houses, we use our crew to assemble the wall panels, man-handling them into place, but a crane can be used for walls. We do use the crane to set to thicker, heavier roof panels.
Our goal with SIPs panels is to create a continuous foam box, surrounding the inside of the home. When you remember that there’s 4” foam under the concrete slab, the 6” foam walls and 10” foam roof trap all the heat inside the house.
The ‘S” in ‘SIP’ stands for structural and the panel-system carries the load of the house, floors and roof, and does not need the sticks of vertical lumber you see in the walls of a conventionally framed house.
How are SIP panels joined? We’ll use the walls as an example:
The SIPs panels typically have the interior foam held-back to form a 1.5” gap at the panel edges. Two panels are joined by setting a ‘spline’ into the recessed gap on one panel, then sliding the second panel over the spline, nailing the connecting spline in place through all four edges. Splines can be made of 2×6 lumber (L-spline), foam mini-SIPs (called S-splines), or an insulated TJI spline (called an I-spline).
Because a 2×6 lumber splines touches both the warm inside of the house wall, and the cold exterior of the house wall, they are said to cold-bridge. A cold-bridge creates a poorly insulated pathway for the warm inside energy to travel to the cold exterior. There a many cold-bridges in conventional framing and that’s why we don’t do it. We aim to minimize L-splines as they have an insulating value of R7.8, compared to R29 for our Neopor graphite foam 6.5” Premiere SIPs wall panels.
Last week the TC Legend Homes crew finished off the SIPs roof structure on the Lake Stevens house.
On average we take about (2) days to assemble the 1st floor SIP wall panels. We build the 2nd floor-level TJI and sheeting floor system over the succeeding (2) days. The upper level walls take a day or so, and then it’s roof-day!
On roof-day the crane arrives early, and the roof panels are rigged, swung up, and screwed in-place by Ted and Norm. The crew have pre-assembled the boundary supports, so we don’t use more crane time and belch more diesel than necessary. The boundary support is a continuous 2×10 that seats into the 1.5” perimeter recess & connects together the outside edge of the roof panels.
SIPs are very fast to assemble and incur almost no waste material onsite because everything arrives pre-cut. Most excess off-cut foam is recycled back into the process during factory fabrication and the Premiere software nests the required panel shapes for maximum efficiency, making Premiere more streamlined, more profitable and more environmentally responsible.
Air sealing is very, very important for energy efficiency.
Imagine a fast, cold wind blowing over the building and all the warm air streaming out through the construction cracks. The Lake Stevens house is modeled to need a maximum of 12,500Btu/ hour to heat in midwinter, if we air-sealed the envelope to 0.6 air-changes per hour. (Note: (1) air-change-per hour assumes the entire volume of the house has the air replaced once within (1) hour).
If we air-sealed the Lake Stevens house to 5.0 air changes per hour, code minimum, we’d need 19,000Btu/h of heating for midwinter! So you can see that air sealing to reduce the air-changes per hour can give over 35% reduction in heating load.
SIPs are a pre-sealed sandwich, and compared to typical construction there are far fewer construction-joints in a SIPs building due to the large SIPs panel size. The standard SIPs assembly process includes installing beads of specialist mastic to air-seal and adhere the panels to each-other. SIPs have a measurable dollar advantage with that high level of pre-sealing and easy panel-to-panel air sealing. Meaning you can buy and run a smaller heat pump. And we haven’t yet examined the standard R29 insulation in the equivalent 2×6 wall!
The TC Legend Homes fellas put up the Lake Stevens house’s insulated concrete form (ICF) walls in the rain last week over the course of just (2) days! Dan said it went well since the soil had a good consistency to seat the Form-a-Drain footing, and the blocks went up fast, as per usual, since everyone likes stacking up Lego blocks!
A Net-Zero house is insulated on all (6) sides, and TC Legend builds with structural insulated panels (SIPs), so we have R-29 SIPs walls all around, R-49 SIPs roof above, and 4” R-20 foam under the slab-on-grade.
The edge of the slab also needs insulation, otherwise there would be a weak spot and heat would leak out through the slab perimeter, into the stem-walls (which are exposed to the weather).
We solve this problem by pouring the stem-walls into R-24 ICF forms which complete the insulted shell of this affordable Net-Zero home.
Concrete has been poured into foam wall-forms since the ‘80s. The hollow blocks go together like Legos with the required re-bar clipped inside, and once full of concrete, the Styrofoam block remains in place performing the job of insulation, and containing concrete while wet. The process is fast and clean, and has lower labor costs compared to traditional concrete forming.
We use NuDura R23.8 ICF blocks to form the stem walls, and retaining walls when we need them. The NuDura blocks are great since they concertina-down to transport. ICF blocks are available in many thicknesses with many variants for different construction requirements. We use 6” walls and usually only order inside-corners, outside-corners and 8’ straight blocks. The NuDura blocks have hard plastic structural strips that accept screws for siding and drywall.
The blocks sit atop the hat-channel that spans the footing form. At Lake Stevens we used Form-a-Drain footing form which, like the ICF’s does not need a form-board to be stripped-down after concrete is poured. The Form-a-Drain replaces 8” footer boards, is hollow, and drains water away from the foundation foot.
The Lake Stevens house has a 4’ stepped retaining wall up-slope and NuDura supply a very, very sticky vapor barrier to waterproof the stem-wall. TC Legend Homes has a metal cap/ cladding system system that wraps the exterior ICF foam from the sill plate downwards below-grade with roofing metal, leaving no visually, or thermally exposed concrete.
ICF’s are great for us! They perform two functions: (1) insulation, and (2) concrete form, they are a smart solution for our thriving Net-Zero, and increasingly Net-Positive SIPs housing in Washington state!
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