Engineered Floor System | Why It Matters

todd usher here with addison homes talking about engineered floor systems [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're here in the crawl space of our zero energy ready model home in seneca south carolina same crawl space that we covered the encapsulated or closed crawl space foundation method you can see we've started framing this house and what we have overhead here are engineered eye joists so this is an engineered i-joist floor system much like a steel i-beam we have a web in the center that's relatively thin and then structural components on the top and bottom these happen to be laminated veneer lumber on the top and bottom with a structural oriented strand board in the center what we have with an engineered product is longer spans for our floor system and a much stiffer floor system one of the other things i want to point out is what we actually have supporting these i joist this is called an lvl or laminated veneer lumber an engineered beam and these engineered beams are run across the foundation supported by foundation piers and they support the spans of our eye joist so the i joists run in this case left to right on the house they're supported by drop beams that are made from engineered lumber and those rest on the foundation piers which sit on concrete footings that include steel rebar so solid foundation from the base up is going to ensure that the homeowner in this home has number one a foundation that's never gonna settle number two a floor system that's incredibly stiff and that's not gonna bounce so they won't have the feeling that they're on a trampoline when they walk across their living room floor now we're standing here above our closed crawl space just for another view of the engineered floor system that we discussed underneath if you take a look with me down here the i joists are spanning a much longer distance than we could span with dimensional lumber and by dimensional lumber i mean like a 2 by 10 or a 2 by 12 floor joist they also have a benefit of they don't move they're more dimensionally stable so natural dimensional lumber can twist cup bow which can result in floor squeaks in the finished home as the house and the building components dry out but with an engineered floor system we don't have to worry about that so another product that we're using in this zero energy ready model home is what's called an engineered floor truss engineered floor trusses have many of the same benefits as engineered eye joists they can span longer distances than dimensional lumber they're very stiff so we don't get a bouncy floor they also can be designed to have a lot of space in between the top and bottom of the floor truss which allows us to run heating and cooling duct work plumbing and even electrical through the floor system really which we choose depends on the goals that we have for that section of the house so often we'll use open web floor trusses over basement homes where we want to run all those mechanicals between the floors or in two-story homes like this particular house where we're going to have a second story above a main level and we want to be able to run our mechanicals through that floor system one of the things you'll notice that's quite different in an open web floor truss is that it actually is built from dimensional lumber in this case it's built from 2x4 lumber so the diagonal webs the top cord and the bottom cord are all dimensional lumber but they're built in an engineered truss that allows them to outperform their dimensional lumber cousins in the application for a floor system one of the other things i should mention about engineered floor truss solutions is that generally they are more sustainable more environmentally friendly and as you can tell from this engineered floor truss one of the reasons these are more sustainable or environmentally friendly is we're using very short pieces of lumber we don't need to harvest long straight trees in order to build floor trusses overall a fantastic product we love using engineered floor trusses it allows us to build homes that are extremely sturdy strong and allows us to keep our heating and cooling duct work inside the conditioned envelope of the house which is extremely important with regard to energy efficiency performance and indoor air quality you

Channel: Addison Homes

Views: 59,087

Keywords: high performance, highperformance, building, construction, addison, homebuilding, homebuilders, healthy, efficient, durable, local, dwell, well, green, home, homes, greenville, engineered, floor, system, joist, open, web, zero, energy, ready, model, engineering, beam, truss, addison homes

Id: pbnmSp07dCo

Length: 5min 27sec (327 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020