Foam vs cladding vs hebel for first floor

Hi all,


New member, first comment, please help We are building a double story house, ground floor brick face and first/upper floor with lightweight material. Now we have come to a situation where we can not decide which lightweight material to go for, decision based on performance and cost. Can people with professional and personal experience please help.

zorson I am in the middle of design and we have hebel panel external walls on the first floor. ground is bricks. hebel will add more cost than traditional blueboards or may be some other cladding and hebel's weight will also add some extra cost to engineering. we think hebel is solid fire proof aac so should be better than polystyrene boards etc. I am unsure about hebel floors.

Thank you idev we have decided to go with fibre cement cladding for the first floor. We had different opinions from experience tradies regarding performance, cost, installing time and other issues…. at the end we ditched the polystyrene for cladding. True the hebel would have been the most efficient for the same price as the cladding ( according to some suppliers even cheaper??? ) but as you said it would have affected the engineering, so cladding it is for us 😊

I doubt moving from fibre cement to Hebel cladding requires any extra engineering, frankly speaking.

StructuralBIMGuy have you ever experienced this?

Couldnt agree more Alex, not for cladding.

Floor joists are a bit different when going with hebel to reduce the deflection, but it's marginal cost wise.

Funny enough it does on Upper floors with set backs/forwards
as beams are required to carry approx 4 Tonnes ( total average) of extra load
If the upper floor bears down on the lower load bearing walls then possibly not?
OT Designers look at plans from above , engineers from below->up and follow the load paths down.
Footnote
As I tell my clients daily in your engineering 3D bim model you can have whatever you want along with the data/proofs, certifications, costs,etc,etc
FB is also exploring the VR Bim Model


hth