Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Oct 11, 2009 4:34 pm Has anyone used Hebel wall panels on the exterior of their home or know much about this product. We have heard/told that it is very good and has been recommended by a builder for us. Is it more expensive than brick or much the same? We are planning to build a two storey home and plan to use it for the upper leve. Any info would be appreciated Thanks for this. Re: Hebel building material 2Oct 14, 2009 12:44 am We're using Hebel. Ours is two storey and both levels will be Hebel. Cost exactly the same as brick, as it was a standard inclusion on 2 storey homes with my builder and there was no price difference to change to brick. Why would you use it for only the top level? What would you do with the bottom level? Brick+Render? I don't know the technical benefits to Hebel v's Brick. There are some threads on it but I don't see anything particular that would sway me in either direction. Re: Hebel building material 3Oct 14, 2009 12:52 am It is light weight and you use glue not cement Where you are coming from is where you are going to... Re: Hebel building material 4Oct 14, 2009 8:43 am Thanks for this information. We are going to use brick and render for ground storey and thought we would use the Hebel for the upper, mainly because it hopefully will not look as heavy as brick can, but still a little undecided. Re: Hebel building material 5Oct 14, 2009 9:57 am Hebel is a lot lighter than bricks and your footings will therefore not have to be as strong/deep. Also, installing hebel is soooo much quicker than laying bricks and therefore you will save a lot of money for scaffolding. Having said that, we are building a two storey brick veneer house and believe that the extra costs will be worth it in the long run. Re: Hebel building material 6Oct 14, 2009 6:35 pm There's a house in my neighbourhood that has a brick ground floor and Hebel upper floor, with the whole thing rendered....we've been watching its progress with interest. So far, they've done about half the render and it looks great. I would have thought Hebel would be cheaper, partly because of the lighter engineering requirements - and I don't know about the cost of the material itself, but there are definitely less labour hours involved in installing it. I think it also has great insulating properties... This is what CSR say about their product: Overall the CSR residential Panel Wall System offers cost savings and returns a greater floor space over standard brick veneer building envelope. CSR Hebel panels are faster to install than bricks, saving on building time. CSR Hebel products are up to one quarter the weight of conventional masonry, reducing the structural load on the design requirements for supporting building materials. Their low weight makes CSR Hebel panels ideal for use in difficult applications such as sloping sites. And this NZ site lists quite a few benefits: http://www.buildingblocks.co.nz/html/benefits.htm Re: Hebel building material 7Oct 14, 2009 7:47 pm Coincidence maybe, but i just spent 10 hours installing hebel power panels on our owner built house. They are fantastic to work with although heavy you need a few blokes to give you a hand but I suppose it doesnt matter if you are paying someone to do it. The finish although not rendered looks fanstastc, very smooth and sleek. The cost savings over brick are heaps, you pay $1 a brick to lay, 80c to buy, if you build a two storey house with say 30000 bricks it is going to cost you around 50g or so. Hebel would cost about 10 grand, 10 grand to render, 5 grand to install. Cheers Re: Hebel building material 9Apr 20, 2010 11:17 am we visited an architect yesterday to pick his brain for two hrs and to come up with some ideas for our land and basic house design that we had. he mentioned hebel and suggested it was a very viable option. cheaper than brick thats for sure and if im rendering it anyway i didnt see the point of paying all that money for brick, and then covering it with render, didnt make sense to me. panels can go to 3000mm in length too, i just finished watching this vid: (top left of the page) hebelaustralia we're deff looking at this as our frame, shell, construction base of the house. got some drawings coming from the architect too in the next 2 weeks hopefully Re: Hebel building material 10Apr 20, 2010 11:34 am There's a place in Marriott Waters that's got Hebel on - but methinks they've been hit by the GFC or other financial problems as the Hebel has been there for about 4 months, with no sign of motion at all internal or externally.....it does look different (but not bad !) Re: Hebel building material 11Apr 21, 2010 10:51 am I think it adds about half a point to insulation (so if you had R2.0 batts in the wall the hebel would take it to R2.5) My parents built their latest house with hebel as it was standard for 2 storey. They built 2 years prior to that 2 storey with brick & render. They prefer the hebel. We wanted to build with hebel however some builders won't do it, some do it cheaper than brick and some do it far more expensive than brick. Apparently in SA one of the big building groups owns (or at least part owns) the big hebel group so can get good prices and build for less. Where as our builder (who used to work for the other big group) can't get the same prices and hebel was going to cost us much more than brick. Re: Hebel building material 12Apr 21, 2010 12:04 pm Part of the reason that we chose our builder was because they use hebel rather than bricks. All in all, it's a superior product. We're building "green" - or as green as we can make a standard builders home with added extras here and there to fit in with council requirements in suburbia. To use a more green product (such as rammed earth, etc) would have added about 200k to the cost of our home according to the estimators/quantity surveyors. Hebel is an aerated concrete. Iit has a lower embodied energy (the energy cost to create it) than bricks, and a higher insulation value. The hebel alone should come in close to what you would get from a fully double bricked home. The product itself is more expensive than brick, but the installation is far cheaper. The costs for fully installed should be relatively on a par. Our house is coming reasonably close to completion now, so the hebel has been well and truly installed, rendered and painted. It looks absolutely magic. Feel free to take a look at my house blog. The hebel installation happened in November, and from then on you can see the product in its raw form and then rendered and painted. Personal preference, I'd use hebel for both floors. If you like the rendered look, hebel all the way. If you want the look of bricks, or need to bolt something into your wall (such as a washing line, but can't bolt far enough in to connect to frame), then hebel isn't for you. Different to what others have said but thanks for that insight. 2 5201 Not recommended! The image presented is for a sublevel area. The footings are down deep with a load bearing wall supporting the upper floor level. If you did that drain… 8 10591 Always get multiple quotes, no matter how reasonable/cheap you think it is. I remember getting a few quotes for a pool fence, roughly around the same price, thinking the… 5 9686 |