Harnessing the speed and durability of tilt-up construction to tackle this country’s housing crisis was the focus of one of the seminars of the recent Buildings Show in Toronto.
With the accelerated demand for durable, energy efficient and affordable housing, tilt-up construction is a solution to meet construction demands, scheduling and budget constraints, said Len Overbeek, a co-founder and owner of Tilt Wall Ontario Inc.
Tilt-up construction is the process of casting walls or other concrete elements onsite and then lifting and placing them into their final location in a structure.
A typical tilt-up panel is comprised of three layers; an exterior wythe of 75-millimetres-thick of concrete, a middle section of a 50- to 200-millimetre-thick of expanded polystyrene (XPS), and a load bearing 125- to 250-millimetre-thick interior concrete wythe. They are joined together as one complete unit with non-thermal conductive ties.
The panels are load bearing and erection of the supporting steel can be begin once the panels are in place. A simple trench footing can be used, the panels can act as grade beam and extend below the frost level, plus eliminate the need for exterior steel piers, he said.
“It’s a simple process that uses local trades and is the most energy efficient process.”
And the procedure is fast. Ninety per cent of the work occurs at ground level and much of it occurs simultaneously. An average panel can be lifted and put into place every 20 to 30 minutes, said Overbeek, demonstrating that point with slides of the company’s work on its first affordable housing project in Belleville, Ont. in 2019.
Home for Good is a 40-unit supportive housing apartment built, operated and managed by the County of Hastings with the assistance of six partner agencies under the Home for Good Program, which is intended to provide housing for the county’s vulnerable and homeless residents. Morden Engineering and Contracting Ltd. was the project manager and Geertsma Construction was the contractor which proposed tilt-up construction in its bid.
“We erected 61 three-storey panels in one week,” said Overbeek in stressing the speed of the erection process.
After the success with this first residential project, Tilt Wall Ontario is ready to make its mark in the residential sector, he said.
Since tilt-up construction uses R20 continuous sandwich panel construction without any thermal bridging, a concrete home is much more energy-efficient than a wood-frame house, said Overbeek, the owner and builder of the first tilt-up home in Ontario.
“I live in a tilt-up concrete house and you wouldn’t notice any differences from any other house on the street,” he said referring to his Woodstock home.
Tilt-up construction does have some limitations.
A large lay down space is required for the pouring and forming of the panels and, to be cost competitive, projects need to be 929 square metres (10,000 square feet or greater), he said.
In addition to the Belleville apartment building, Overbeek touched on some of the company’s other projects including the Muskoka Bay Resort in Gravenhurst. Involving the use of approximately 13.4 million pounds of concrete to create the floor and wall slabs, the project was one of the 2021 Ontario Concrete Award winners.
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