You’re watching your neighbour build their house. One week, they’ve poured in the concrete and the next week you see the whole house appear out of know where! Did that really happen in one week? This is what we in the biz call prefabrication or off-site construction.
Simply explained, prefabrication (or prefab) is when structural components of your house are assembled remotely and brought to your plot of land to be assembled. It’s a myth that houses that use the prefabricated method of construction are lazy, low-end, and mass-produced. On the contrary, prefabricated construction is gaining momentum because of its environmental benefits, varied price points, and quality assurance by builders.
If you’re building a Passive House, you’ll want to look into a prefabricated construction method, they go hand in hand. Here’s why:
- Achieving airtightness: Assembling parts of the house in a controlled factory environment allows the production of components with tighter joints and better air filtration, at scale. This will give you the result of better wall insulation required for increased energy efficiency in your passive house.
- Cost savings: Producing these components at scale means that the builder is able to sell them at competitive prices. The builders may even receive bulk discounts from material suppliers which further lowers the overall project cost.
Additionally, the passive house construction process requires extreme precision and constant supervision so that the contractors on site are able to achieve the airtight building envelope for your energy-efficient home. Taking this construction to the factory also means you don’t have to pay for additional contractor hours to supervise this process.
- Time savings: Prefabrication takes less than half the time vs traditional construction. This is because the construction is pre-planned and not delayed by factors such as weather or subcontractor delays. You also have the added advantage of multiple components being produced simultaneously, something that is not possible when building ground up on your plot.
- Low impact construction: Having most of the heavy lifting done in the factory means that you will have a significantly less impact in terms of additional people / heavy truck traffic, waste generated on-site, and general noise pollution and irritants on site. (Your neighbours will thank you!) Additionally, any waste generated at the factory or at the builder’s site is reused or recycled at the site itself vs being sent to the landfill from your plot.
iConstruct is a proud member of the Australian Passive House Association and possesses the expertise required to plan and build a passive house suited to your lifestyle and budget. We’re proud to partner with Eclipse to provide you with quality prefabrication that allows you to create the house you want at the site you choose far quicker than any other method – get in touch to discuss how we can help you!
Exciting update! We’ve installed the prefab on our Queens Park project this month. Watch for more updates on our Instagram page!
