Build Better ICF Homes
Need To Know Facts
Whether you’re building a home that’s large or small, or living in the cooler North or warmer South, when you build a Logix ICF home, you’ll get a stronger, more resilient and more energy-efficient home that will significantly reduce your consumption of natural resources while surrounding your family with unsurpassed comfort and safety.
Virtually any home design can be built with Logix ICF. Most full-height XtraComfort Logix ICF homes are built with our 6.25″ or 8″ concrete core thickness. Larger homes and heavier loading may require wider concrete cores.
Logix offers engineering tables and the online One Minute Engineer. Both resources comply with prevailing and accepted concrete design standards and conventions. Logix prescriptive engineering covers a wide range of typical residential applications and thus for many XtraComfort Logix ICF homes additional site specific engineering is not required to obtain a building permit.
When you built with Logix Pro, the finished walls in your XtraComfort Logix ICF home will have an effective R-value of R25. Higher R-value levels an be achieved by upgrading to Logix Platinum Series (R28) or using the Logix D-Rv Panel (up to R37).
Your home’s effective thermal performance will be enhanced by the 5 day thermal lag provided by the high-mass concrete core in the Logix exterior walls.
And finally, due to the monolithic nature of Logix construction, your home will be inherently air-tight. In fact, 9 of the most common 19 air-leakage trouble spots shown below are inherently solved by regular Logix construction. And the remaining 10 air-leakage trouble spots are addressed by incremental construction techniques listed in the High Performance Homes application page.
To learn how all these elements work together to create truly superior energy efficiency and significant energy savings – read “The ICF Effect on Energy Efficiency” article.
“So How Much Does An XtraComfort Logix ICF Home Cost Compared To A Traditionally Built Home?”
Every home, homeowner, builder and region are different and there are many variables in play that make it difficult to arrive at a consistently accurate rule of thumb. But here is an example that illustrates the general economics of Logix, given typical lumber prices and interest rates.
Below grade, the cost of Logix construction should be similar to the cost of a well insulated and framed conventional foundation.
Above grade, let’s assume the cost of an unfinished Logix ICF wall can cost in the range of $4 – $7 more per square foot than an ordinary 2×6 stick-framed wall.
And for this example let’s take a bungalow with 2,000 sq ft of living space that has 1,800 sq ft of above grade walls.
- $150/sq ft – Turnkey budget price to build this home conventionally with a well insulated and framed foundation.
- $300,000 – Budget price for the turnkey conventional build (assume $150 sq ft x 2,000 sq ft of floor area)
- $10,800 – Additional cost to build the above grade walls with Logix ICF (assume $6/sq ft premium x 1,800 sq ft of above grade walls)
- 3.6% – Cost premium to build with Logix ICF ($310,800 – $300,000)/$300,000
- $50.50/mth – Additional monthly payment to finance $10,800
So in this case, if your total heating, cooling, insurance and maintenance savings exceed $50/mth, then building with Logix ICF will actually save you money every month.
Plus, the cost of framing lumber is FAR more volatile than ICF pricing and when the cost of lumber spikes, as it did in spring 2018, summer 2020 and again in spring 2021, the cost of regular wood-frame walls will actually approach and can exceed the cost of higher-performance Logix ICF walls.
Learn more about the benefits of Logix ICF’s long-term price stability HERE!
