foreign I think aircrete is a really interesting Building Material because the ingredients that it's made with are available everywhere on the planet and aircrete works well in pretty much every climate there is there's aircrete domes all over the world that are both beautiful and attractive and unique but also very very cost effective and something also that people can do themselves so on the surface aircrete looks just like concrete but when you pick it up it's super light so it's something like you almost would expect to see it on a movie set it's made from a
mixture of cement and foam and the foam is a water-based foam made with a foaming agent and it's mixed together and it's poured into a mold and it's let to set to cure into bricks or into other shapes depending on what you're building with it there are different formulas for making aircrete but the most basic recipe is just Portland cement and a water-based foam made with dish detergent so when you're making aircrete it's really simple you start with a mixing container where you put one 94 pound bag of Portland cement you're going to mix that
with six gallons of water and you just use a hand mixer and you mix this until it's a really kind of creamy slurry and make sure that there's no clumps in it and then it's time to add the phone before you've added the foam you first need to weigh your foam and calibrate it and it needs to be a specific density so the foam that you use should be between 90 and 100 grams per liter and so you just fill up your quart bucket with the foam and you weigh it on their sensitive digital scale
and then you can add air or subtract air from the foam depending on whether it's too heavy or too light there's a lot of things with building with aircrete that are very forgiving and you you don't need to be very precise but the one thing that you have to be very very precise with is the actual quality of the foam and once you've got this dialed in then you go ahead and you start mixing in the foam and we use a special mixer that injects the foam at the bottom right where the mixing blades are
and this allows for a consistent mix so you're mixing the foam into the cement slurry and it's just filling up filling up filling up and so you go from one bag of cement all the way up to about 42 gallons of aircrete once this is mixed up you pick up the 45 gallon garbage can with handles on the side and then you go ahead and you pour that into molds we use some of our own brick molds we typically make a brick anywhere from four inches thick by 12 by 12 all the way up to
12 inches thick the next day the aircrete it hasn't fully set but it's usually cured enough where you can pull it out of the molds and handle it delicately in about seven days it's reached you know around 80 percent of its strength but you can start building with it right away as long as you're delicate with it it's super light to work with so one of these bricks of air Creed really just weighs maybe about 10 pounds or so so then you can stack those and let them cure a little bit longer then you know
plan out what you're going to do with it as you can see this is an exposed aircrete wall that we haven't finished yet so I want to talk a bit about this it's made with cement and foam and so it doesn't rot it doesn't rust it's not eaten by insects or bugs so this makes it suitable for all climates aircrete also has insulation value which is a great benefit as you're building you don't have to add extra insulation it's hard enough to hold up a whole structure but it's soft enough to make it very easy
to cut and carve with so for example when we're building a wall like this aircrete is incredibly forgiving we don't have to be precise with anything that we're doing because we can come back and easily shape it anything that sticks out too much we can just cut it right off we can fill in gaps so that makes it really easy for a new beginner because you need very minimal tools and experience to build a wall like this so for example when you're working with aircrete we're going to be cutting a window in here and so
here's our measurements let's say I wanted to make a measurement I can just scratch that right there I can you know just it's very easy to make a Mark I can put a screw right into it just like that and so it's just little things like that add up in the construction process and you go wow this is just so easy to work with the other thing that you'll notice about this wall is that we put our electrical in afterwards so we did have a general plan of where we wanted the electrical but we didn't
need to plan it out in perfect detail and it was easy to make some design changes after we saw the finished product so here we've just come back and very easily with very basic tools just scored in the places for the electrical conduit and boxes which will all then all get covered up in our final layer okay so one of the questions that people ask is if it's so easy to work with then how do you make it strong when we build with aircrete we use a composite material system where aircrete is the inner core
of the wall and we use a fiberglass reinforced stucco on the inside and the outside the best way to think about it is like this a surfboard where a surfboard has a foam core on the inside and then fiberglass layers on the outside if you were to take any of those three materials by themselves they wouldn't be very strong the fiberglass would be quite bendable and the foam would break when you combine them all together they make a super strong structure and so these walls are fiberglass reinforced on the inside and outside and the shape
of the arch combined with that makes for a super strong structure and then there's a waterproofing layer applied on the outside so there's a number of different applications for air greet in the building process um traditionally aircrete has been used for really like large applications where you're kind of filling big cavities it's used to cover a big commercial rooftops it says used in a wide range of industrial applications for smaller projects we were the first to come up with a low-cost small portable foam generator that people could use and before this the only foam generators
that were available were these huge commercial and Industrial machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars and so our little foam generator was the first thing that allowed almost anybody to make aircrete anywhere in the world it's portable it's inexpensive and it also produces a high volume of foam so it's really practical to use even on a good size build we found aircrete is perfect for making Dome and Arch buildings and the shape of the Dome shell itself is load-bearing but many people are using aircrete and other types of applications for using straight wall buildings
and they may add some additional pillars of concrete here and there for strength or they'll frame the whole building in a more traditional way and then they'll use aircrete as the infill but you know aircrete it doesn't have near the strength that concrete has but it still has quite quite a lot of strength it also provides insulation value the aircrete is going to be somewhere between 1.8 R and 2.2 R per inch and this is again going to depend on your specific formula and density these numbers have come from various lab results from you know
different people getting their aircrete samples tested and this is again fairly low compared to a traditional like foam board which might be as high as like five or six R per inch but the cost of aircrew is much lower and it does provide good insulation value while also you know providing some structural some sound barrier and also thermal Mass it's one thing that's overlooked as well and when you get into a thicker wall you know thermal Mass can play a big role in the efficiency of a building so one question we get asked is you
know what types of climates aircrete has been in and aircrete actually works well in pretty much every climate there is in the tropics it's very good because it's mold proof it doesn't rot insects don't eat it so it's very long lasting and it does provide insulation value from the Heat in kind of more arid desert climates it does provide good insulation value and thermal Mass because you have a big difference between the day and nighttime temperatures so that's when the thermal Mass plays a part and as you go into more and more cold climates air
creates you know just again you would go thicker and thicker with your wall to provide more insulation but I you know I think it's a an appropriate material to use in pretty much every climate there is so when you're building with aircrete and you want to start to calculate some of your costs your most basic cost is going to be the Portland cement you know what is one bag of Portland cement cost this varies kind of wildly now depending on the region but you might be looking at somewhere in the vicinity of like 60 to
90 plus bags of cement for a small building and the foaming agent cost is quite low I think you know for a small building you might be looking at about 200 in total foaming agent and then the other costs are going to be the cost of the fiberglass mesh that's also fairly low but your next significant cost will be your stucco layers and depending on the type of plaster that you're going to use and on our website we have a cost calculator or a material calculator that you can plug in the size of the Dome
that you want and then it'll calculate how much cement and then you can multiply that by the cost of your cement so building permits are a big sticking point when anyone is building with any natural or alternative building technique aircrete is currently not listed on kind of the international approved list of building materials but we have worked with an engineer and there are engineering companies that will help people get approved so the question of the building permits is going to depend a lot on your specific building department and it's going to start with a conversation
in terms of you know if they have an engineer stamp will they give you a permit do you need a permit depends on the size of the building you know one thing that aircrete is great at is building very small buildings so these might be glamping structures or buildings that are under the requirement size for a building permit some of the challenges to building with aircrete are that you know getting the recipe right the first time does take a little bit of finesse getting your foam to be perfect it takes a little bit of learning
and so there can be some problems some of the common problems with a making aircrete is the air Creek mixture collapsing and this is almost always due to either a low quality foam that doesn't meet the right specifications or some minerals in the water that are interfering with the foam very very cold temperatures can also cause a problem but that can be counteracted by using warm water but once you get these things in you know you can get very consistent results over and over again the other challenges to working with aircrete is you do have
to lift you know some bags of cement so although aircrete is very light you know there is some work that goes into handling the materials and it is just a new process you know not a lot of people know about it so well there is you know knowledge available to learn everything it still is something new and a little bit unique so people might look at you a little bit weird but you know again these are things that can be learned and overcome fairly easily is a company that was founded by my father hajjar and
he was on a quest to figure out how to solve the global housing crisis and how to build structures and homes that are permanent very affordable but also elegant and beautiful and that's where aircrete was married with his Dome building techniques and this produced just really the perfect match so domgaia now teaches workshops at different locations all over the world our workshops are hosted by landowners that want one of our structures built and we have a partnership with them where you know they provide all the materials and and the setting for the students to come
so it's a really you know good deal for everybody we always have lots of information on our website you can download the recipes we have a free ebook that covers a lot of this and then we have different online courses you can get on our newsletter our mailing list that's really the best way to stay in touch with us and on our YouTube channel where we're always publishing new information and we're continuing to work on our designs we're working with Engineers we're working with Architects to get things a little bit more refined in that so
they can be more permitted we're also hoping to work with more Laboratories to get more test data on the air Creed so we have more official data with it so there's always something interesting going on foreign [Music] Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it you can also check out our playlists with lots of videos about alternative building materials and techniques thanks for watching
