Expanded clay cladding: modern building material
The construction of any home requires certain financial investments and labor. Each person planning to start fulfilling his dream wants to minimize any costs.
And this is normal. Expanded clay blocks with cladding can help in solving this problem, like no other material. They will be discussed in our article.
The content of the article
Expanded clay blocks
Expanded clay is an artificially created, but environmentally friendly material, since foamed clay is its raw material. As a result of firing in a furnace, hollow, almost weightless balls with a strong sintered shell are obtained.
So:
- Despite the fact that the balls are porous, they are able to withstand significant loads. The presence of internal voids allows you to keep heat well.
Thanks to these properties, expanded clay for many decades has been an excellent bulk insulation, as well as used in the production of wall materials. - Reinforced concrete plants were the first to produce claydite-concrete foundation and wall blocks without facing. Their molding is made from a solution of Portland cement with the addition of expanded clay as a filler.
Concrete poured into molds of a given size and configuration is carefully compacted.
- The sizes of blocks, as a rule, are multiple to the sizes of bricks, as well as products from reinforced concrete. When erecting walls, this allows you to withstand the dimensional standards of window and doorways.
Expanded clay blocks are used not only for the construction of basement and external walls, but also for the installation of interroom partitions, as well as the internal layout of the room.
Views
Depending on the purpose, the blocks can be hollow, solid and slotted. To build walls of such material, an experienced person can three times faster than brick.
A newbie in this business, who wants to build a house with his own hands, should take his work seriously: read materials on the topic, watch a video.
The price of a wall block depends on its design. A full-bodied block is the most expensive, since more raw materials are used for its production. For the construction of load-bearing walls, they are mainly used.
Due to the excellent thermal insulation characteristics of expanded clay concrete, the minimum thickness of such an external wall can be as little as 40 cm, while a brick wall should have a thickness of 60 cm. At the same time, the useful area of the house increases and the load on the foundation is halved.
- More recently, block masonry had to be plastered or performed facade decoration. Now the need for this has disappeared, due to the fact that claydite-concrete blocks for cladding external walls have appeared.
They can be colored, or have a decorative coating on the front side. - The color block is no different, in general, from a conventional product, just inorganic pigments are added to the molding mixture. The spectrum of their colors, in general, is not rich.
Expanded clay-concrete cladding blocks with a decorative coating are quite another matter! Here we will talk about them in more detail.
- The decorative block is a “sandwich” of two layers of concrete, and a layer of expanded polystyrene. But the facing of expanded clay concrete block may be different.
For this purpose, manufacturers use printed concrete, tiles, decorative mixtures. - Accordingly, the appearance of the wall will imitate at least brickwork, at least marble, at least plaster.Factory cladding of expanded clay concrete blocks eliminates the need for facade decoration.
And this is a significant saving both in materials and in the cost of external finishing works. - You do not need to be a mathematician to understand that building a house from expanded clay concrete blocks with cladding will be much cheaper than from any other material. Masonry is very convenient: there are half blocks, there are corner ones.
For a bricklayer, this is important - there is no need to waste time cutting material, as is the case with bricks or blocks of cellular concrete. And this is also a saving!
- The photo above shows that the depth of the wall block corresponds to the minimum wall thickness, and is equal to forty centimeters. This means that in a warm climate zone there will be enough masonry in one block.
And no insulation, in this case, is also required. But in our country there are not many such warm regions. What do the rest do? - The answer is simple. You can put a wall in two blocks, but use it: on the facade side, the cladding blocks are expanded clay concrete, and on the inside - ordinary ones, without decorative coating.
By the way, there may be various combinations of structural materials. - As an option, from the inside, the masonry of the wall can be made with clinker or any decorative brick, and outside - facing expanded clay concrete blocks. In this way, two tasks are simultaneously solved: insulation of the facade, and its decoration.
- Facing a house from expanded clay concrete blocks can also be done if it is frame-panel or wooden. This can only be done during the construction process, since the block masonry should be based on the foundation.
- If you want to use the decorative blocks to warm and clad the old house, you have to dig up the foundation and add it. Instructions for doing this work on the Internet are always there.
- In principle, the foundation is also dug up when the external wall cladding is performed with decorative brick. But the size of the brick is almost four times smaller than the size of the block, and topping up there may not be required.
It’s up to you to decide whether to do such a laborious job, or if it’s easier to take apart the walls of an old house and build new ones.
Due to the variety of textures and colors of the front surface of decorative blocks, it is possible to create a beautiful wall design, alternating colors in a certain sequence throughout the facade. You can choose a lot of other options: decorate the contrasting corner and window sill areas, or select a fragment of the wall adjacent to the entrance.
With some effort and a little imagination, you can build a house whose facade will never need to be repaired. And this is a lot!
