Structural Insulated Panels

Sorry this is a little late, but its been a very busy past 2 weeks. I'm just going to cover week one with this post. In less than 4 days time, we we're able to get the Dang House framed, sheathed, and insulated. This was only made possible through the utilization of prefabricated SIPS which accomplishes all three of these things in only one step.

The entire envelope of the house was delivered in pieces on the back of a truck. When we first got the drawings back from the SIPS engineering team, I wondered why they broke the roof panels up into 5, 8 feet wide pieces instead of just leaving it as 1 big panel. When the truck came I realized that it was because the truck bed was only 8 feet wide. This was based purely on the ability to deliver the panels to site. The walls are 4 1/2 inches thick and the roof is 8 1/4 inches. So the dimensions of the panels are exactly what they would have been if framed traditionally. 

We used a fork lift with a boom to lift the panels from the ground onto our subfloor which is 12 feet high. The walls dangled upright and set into place. Any fine adjustments were done by beating the panels closer with a sledge hammer or using an industrial ratchet strap to pull the loose panel tight to the one already in place.  

The roof panels had a hole pre drilled that we inserted a pin into. The hole was placed so that the panel would dangle at about the pitch that it needed to be installed at.

Each piece attached to the next with a pair of 2x splines that fit into each other tongue and groove and was nailed along seam every 3 inches. 

The breaks in the wall panels occurred at every window/door opening or 8 feet, whichever came first. You can see the breaks in the wall panels in this image, each time the sipsteamsusa.com logo is stenciled its a the beginning of a new piece.  

The framing for the openings came factory installed, the headers stuck out an 3 inches and inserted into a precut slot above a double 2x4 jack on the panel adjacent to it on either side.

Every corner was screwed together with one screw every 6 inches using special SIP screws. The first 5 inches of the screw is unthreaded so that it will grab only the adjacent and suck the panel tight to the panel being screwed through. In the top image you can also see the 3 chases for electrical wires that run the entire perimeter of the building envelope. 

I'm going to show a couple of images of one of the more important sections of the assembly, the bearing wall the runs the length of the house. On this wall the 2x6 wall, an laminated veneer lumber (lvl) beam, the inside edge of both roofs and the clearstory all meet and carry the load to the ground. On the lower roof we built a sips curb, similar to that on the walls to attach the clearstory to, the upper roof then sits directly on top of the clearstory.

This past week we had a group of volunteers come on spring break from Virginia Tech. We started many things, roofing, siding, interior framing, and decking. Amongst this was mardi gras, numerous parades, countless numbers of beads, and my first ultramarathon. An update on those things will follow.

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