Amazing Lego-Style HEMP BLOCKS Make Building a House Quick, Easy & Sustainable

[Music] what i love about building with these blocks is it's like lego for adults that's what everybody can relate to temp crete is a great insulator it's fire resistant it's easy to build with and it's good for the environment so our mix is comprised of hemp herd which is the inner core of the hemp plant and we mix that with lime the reason we developed this uh modular building block was to make it easier to work with hemp crete and easier to integrate hemp crete into current building standards my brother is the one who invented the product and the mac helped somebody do a hemp build that was in situ meaning you tap it in place on site and uh it was taking an extraordinarily long amount of time and they had to wait for it to dry as well so he was thinking there's got to be a better way we love hemp crete but it has to be something that's easy for builders to use to make it practical for a building product so that's kind of why we develop the block so we can be on par or slightly more expensive than conventional building materials but way superior as far as the performance of the building once it's done it's hemp crete with the load bearing capacity of high performance concrete so you're getting all the benefits of a concrete wall with half the weight and the insulation values are 10 times more it meets or exceeds the passive house standards for for energy consumption we developed the blocks to be easy to handle they're only about 25 pounds they stack and interlock together and makes an integral structure that becomes monolithic once they're all put together and it's fast to work with so there's no waiting for anything to dry once you stack the wall up it's ready to go black frames are the heavy duty frames which are designed for tall wall heights of 30 feet and the green winds are the standard duty or light duty frames which are designed for residential and they're good for freestanding walls of about 20 feet so this is the internal structure that's load bearing and provides a structural support this is the hemp lime matrix that we put around it for insulation and this is a scratch coat we use so we can apply the lime plaster and the lime stucco directly on the exterior and the interior but as you can see it's pretty simple it's a hemp and lime wrapped around a structural frame and you can see here we have conduit holes for electrical every 5.3 inches you can run electrical conduit through here while you're putting the blocks together there's no sand in any of our materials so you can cut these with a band saw or a reciprocating saw on site now we actually don't like the word crete because we don't use any concrete in our mix so the reason we use lime as part of our mix is because it uh is more environmentally friendly it reabsorbs the co2 that was released when it was being manufactured so between the hemp absorbing the the co2 as it grows and then sequestering the co2 in the in the material as well as the lime reabsorbing the co2 it actually becomes a carbon negative material so it actually absorbs more carbon more co2 than is released in its in its life other benefits of hemp is that being rapidly renewable what that means is that it grows quickly so for example it'll take a tree 20 years to get to maturity so you can harvest it whereas with a hemp crop it's like 90 days 110 days well this is uh what the hemp plant looks like once it's dried out so you can see how thick the stalk is that's the part that contains the fiber on the outside and the hemp herd on the inside and you can see how tall it grows and this actually isn't the tallest variety out there so this is what a dried hemp stock looks like we put the structural frame on the inside of the block it has high compression ratio so it can withstand as much pressure as concrete and same for shear strength for wind and hurricanes and and earthquakes because of the way it all goes together it transfers the load amongst the whole wall assembly not just a point where it meets the ground so there's a whole bunch of benefits that we've designed into the block to make it stronger and a better way to build so it looks pretty simple just like lego but really there's a whole lot more going on in the material choices and in the way it's built that makes it a really really excellent building material for not just for residential but for commercial buildings as well and institutional we first of all started off with using wood supports because we thought that would be environmentally friendly the problem we have is that wood is not consistent when it comes to compressive strength and flexural and so if there's a knot in your piece of wood it'll vary the numbers greatly for compression strength so it was very difficult to be able to use wooden supports so what we ended up doing is creating a moldable piece that we could reproduce reliably we came up with our own formulation of a bio-composite material where we can use vegetable oil-based polyester resins or polyols and it's more like an epoxy than it is a plastic it's like a thermal set which means it doesn't deform with heat the biggest problem with plastics is if they get hot they'll kind of go wobbly on you and as will steel if it gets hot enough this does not deform and also once it's set up it doesn't emit any vocs after it's been set so this is kind of a demonstration wall that we put together so it shows the interior of the the hemp blocks what they look like and these are the interior frames by the way we just cut these on a band saw they're cut in half to make a flush end and that's how we do it we put mortar in between to seal them for air gap when you cut the very top coarser blocks off then we'll put the top of wall strip on that this is simply a stucco finish on the exterior and we have a plaster finish on the interior this is lime plaster and lime stucco this wall is about 12 inches thick with the stucco and the plaster because the blocks are about ten and three-quarter inches wide so total width is about 12. so this this is a complete wall system uh meaning that once you stack the blocks up and you put the mortar in between as you stack them and you're you're done like you put the top of the wall on it you can now put your second floor on or your roof trusses right on top of it and as you stack them up they're actually fitting on the sockets inside the supports it's not resting on the actual amp material so that way you get a very even wall going all the way up to the top there's an art to doing masonry and you don't have to have that skill to do this with our blocks they're self-leveling in effect compared to masonry courses you cannot use hemp lime below grade because it will decompose so what we did is we developed a product that can be made out of either recycled plastics or out of soybean oil to create foam and so what we did is we've got a waterproof block just like our hemp blocks that you can use below grade now and it's super light the same thing goes up real fast you finish it like it was insulated concrete form except there's no concrete so you just stack the blocks up put your skin on the outside you're good to go and it's super insulated it's got like an r70 value on it so one of the questions we get all the time is about hemp why did we pick hemp well when we first started this little adventure we didn't even mention it was hemp because everybody would make jokes like well do you get high if your house catches on fire you know can i smoke it what's so people didn't understand the difference between hemp and cannabis and marijuana so we didn't even mention it so we said hey it's a bio fiber material hence the name just bio fiber but now that hemp is becoming more popular people beginning to understand all the benefits and thousands of uses of hemp for food but also for oils for pharmaceutical purposes the fiber's been used for thousands of years to make textiles the reason we use hemp is because it's a great great material it's got a bunch of benefits it's an insulator and it also has thermal capacity to regulate the temperature it's fire resistant we've tested ours to over two hours a fire rating with 100 structural integrity and the other thing is it regulates the interior humidity so it gives you a very comfortable environment reduces the amount of noise transmission between the wall and the inside and outside and also the beauty about hemp is it sequesters like 1.6 times its weight in co2 while you know the plant's been growing so it's a great carbon sink you know sequestering about 10 tons of carbon for every every house that's a big deal please share this video if you liked it also be sure to subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 2,545,680

Keywords: green, building, materials, carbon, neutral, negative, sink, sequester, sequestering, hemp, hempcrete, blocks, block, lime, code, bricks, stack, residential, commercial, institutional, projects, crop, rapidly, renewable, resource, Just BioFiber, Exploring Alternatives, material, concrete, strength, sustainable, insulation, fire, resistant, humidity, plaster, house, home, alternative, cement, interlocking, natural, eco, friendly, cost, energy, efficient, CO2, hurd, fiber, new, technology, Alberta, Canada, manufacture, 2021, building with hemp

Id: eqLXXjvQXgI

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021