PolySteel benefits over wood frame are numerous:

• The external walls of the home resist the formation of black mold and provide no food for termites or carpenter ants. PolySteel even offers the only code approved manufactured ICF infused throughout with PerformGuard. PerformGuard is a natural earth friendly patented borate solution added to the foam during the bead expansion process making our forms the only form directly useable below grade in heavily termite infested areas of the country.
• The home will withstand hurricane category 5 winds with flying debris.
• The exterior walls are rated at a 4 hour fire rating! This is the highest certified fire rating for any wall construction technique including any ICF wall!
• A PolySteel home is extremely quiet with a Sound Transmission Class of 56.  What this means to you is that you enjoy "Theater Room Quality" quietness inside your home.  Theater Quality sound isolation starts at about STC = 40. Ever hear car or road noise or get woke up by barking dogs - you won't have to worry about that with a PolySteel home.
• The homes insulation qualities are far superior to wood framing with batt insulation.  The polystyrene alone provides R-22...  With R40 blown into the attic PolySteel provides a written 10 year warranty guaranteeing no less than a 33% energy savings on heating and cooling bills compared to wood frame construction with R19 batt insulation in the walls! With other energy saving features, we commonly see savings much higher than this.
• Air Infiltration and your heating/cooling costs: Because the walls become solid monolith vertical slabs of concrete,  air infiltration into the home is also greatly reduced. Reduction in air infiltration helps save in heating and cooling costs because it reduces how frequently your conditioned air gets replaced with outside air.  In typical homes, the entire volume of air inside the structure is replaced with outside air every 2 to 3 hours meaning you have to re heat or re cool that volume of air all over again. In a PolySteel home it typically takes 9 to 11 hours for a complete house exchange to occur. Please see our other comments on energy savings, humidity, and air quality.
• You save money on HVAC equipment as less heating and cooling is required for your home. The HVAC equipment for the first home we built in Austin was sized by two independent studies and came in at 1 ton required / 1100 SF of conditioned floor space! That is about 1/2 the tonnage that would have been required otherwise.
• A PolySteel home is like a fortress as the walls are solid rebar reinforced concrete and so a gunshot fired directly at the wall will stop without entering the interior of the house. Ballistic tests available. Debris thrown by storms or hurricanes bounce off our walls.
• PolySteel homes do not shift or settle. This virtually eliminates the cracking above doorways or window sills often seen in wood frame homes. Wood is a porous material that expands and contracts with temperature and humidity. Concrete does not.
• PolySteel exceeds ALL building codes in every state.

• Insulating Concrete Forms (ICFs) are expressly listed as a prescriptive method of building in the model building codes.

• ICFs are listed as a building material in the newest update of the Construction Specification Institute's MasterFormat

• The National Association of Home Builders has created a Concrete Homebuilders Council.

• The additional up front expense to upgrade to our walls, if financed over 30 years is offset by the savings in heating and cooling bills when comparing to a typical builder grade home. So to the consumer,  you live in a better home and may pay less money each month to live there.

• If you are considering building a home and you are at the maximum of your borrowing potential,  you can still borrow the additional money required to upgrade to our walls through the PolySteel Energy Efficient Mortgage as part of the National Energy Star Program.

• Finally, PolySteel offers a complete program for the Owner/Builder who wants to be their own General Contractor. There is a lot of work cut out for you if you go this route, but if you qualify and are up for the challenge of building your own home,  you can save a substantial amount of money that would have otherwise been paid to the builder.  We have a complete consultation service available to you and a step-by-step Owner/Builder Manual to assist you with ever facet of building your own home - from picking a lot to hiring sub-contractors. We will also supply you with a list of sub-contractors to bid the various segments of your project. We also have in place the interim construction financing you will require to fund the draw stages of your project. Contact Us for more information.