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Archive for January 31st, 2010

Using Solar Energy Panels on your Steel Buildings: Icing on the Cake

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Steel buildings are known for their efficiency in construction and resource utilization. This means steel buildings have the least carbon footprint among all other construction material. It also utilizes little of precious natural resources like water that are heavily used in more traditional building constructions. Therefore by using steel buildings, you have already done a lot to save and protect the environment. Since steel is almost completely recyclable, it also helps to move towards a more sustainable future.

Steel buildings also help cut running costs quite significantly. By property designing insulation pads for the building during the steel building construction, the costs of heating and cooling can be reduced. This makes steel building maintenance and running costs to be much less than their traditional counterparts.

Now, there is another step that you can take with steel buildings – install solar energy panels for your building. This will further help you towards going green and using renewable energy sources to power your building. Solar panels can add the element of social responsibility to your building by helping you go towards reducing your carbon footprint further. In addition, solar panels are like an intelligent investment as they help you save on your electricity bills for many years to come.

By installing solar panels for your steel building, you can now become energy sufficient, without having to depend on the grid for your needs. In addition, depending on where you live, you may also get to sell the electricity that you produce to the grid. This can translate into direct profits. The initial cost of installing solar panels can seem daunting at first. However, the equipment comes highly subsidized because governments want to promote the use of cleaner energy sources. There are a variety of financing options available for renewable energy sources that you can avail of.

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How Steel Buildings Help Save Money

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Steel buildings are not only great structures from a functional and aesthetic point of view but also go easy on your pocket. The cost of a steel building can be quite significantly less than a conventional building of similar dimensions and utility. From afar, it is almost impossible tell them apart. In addition, steel buildings are environmentally friendly, take minimum time and labor to erect and can be highly pleasing to look at with a great degree of aesthetic beauty incorporated in them.

When you go in for prefabricated steel buildings, the cost decreases even further owing to machine automated manufacturing processes. In addition, these buildings have a very low cost of maintenance. Steel buildings are also good on the energy front, and you can save money for your heating and cooling costs. Simple insulations with your steel building can prove to be very effective against temperature fluctuation outside. They also allow for a number of architectural elements to be incorporated, like skylights that can help save a lot of money in the long run. Thus steel buildings not only are good during the construction process but also for long term building maintenance.

In addition, steel is very easily recycled, so if you no longer need your building, you can always recycle it. Paints for steel buildings are quite cheap and help give a great artistic and aesthetic look to your building while also preventing rust and other wear and tear over the years.

Steel buildings, especially the prefabricated ones, require very little labor to put them all together. This means you will only end up spending for the transport to your site – the bolting together of the whole structure can simply be done by you. Even if you do require some labor, it is usually cheap and you will require very little number of people.

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Best Known Steel Buildings

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Many a times, steel buildings evoke a response that is related to low cost low quality housing units after the World War, which is far from truth. In fact, that wasn’t even the time when the best steel structures were erected. The best known steel buildings predate this era and have stood as monuments testifying the efficiency and effectiveness of steel as a structural element, central to all construction. Here are a few best known steel buildings in the world –

The Sears Tower is perhaps one of the most famous towers round. It is today the fifth tallest building in the world and has the highest habitable floors and elevator rides. From the top of the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower), you can actually see four states! The Sears Tower has been the pride of Chicago for a very long time. It is fairly modern, being completed in 1973, but is still quite beautiful and full of relevance even today.

Paris has one of the finest steel buildings in the world. Eifel Tower, the pride of Paris, is a gigantic steel building that was built in 1887. Over a century old, it is still one of the best tourist attractions in the world. It was also once the tallest building in the world, just like Sears Tower. Steel buildings tend to be the tallest, owing to the strength and stability of the structures! The Chrysler building in Paris is another amazing building in Paris from the 1930s and was one of the best and most popular buildings in the whole of Europe. It was the Empire State Building that finally took the sheen off Chrysler Building!

Germany had its fair share of steel buildings as well, with one of the best engineers and scientists of all time working on them. The Seagram Building, for example, is a famous building with a very strong and sturdy skeleton that is at once fully functional and artistically beautiful.

Steel buildings occupy a very special place in history and are sure going to shape the future as well.

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A Brief History of Steel

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

In order to fully appreciate the value of steel buildings, it is important to understand what is steel and how it came into being. This short history will help you appreciate the value of steel and the role it has played in transforming our society.

Steel primarily contains iron and carbon, with the fraction of carbon varying according to the type of steel (usually between 0.4% and 2.1%). Steel is preferred over iron as it is more ductile and strong. In addition, by varying the quantity of carbon and other trace elements like tungsten, manganese, chromium, etc. the properties of steel can be greatly varied depending on the application. One property that immediately distinguishes steel from the different types of iron is the fact that steel is rust-proof, a very important property not only in buildings but also in many other applications.

The processes for mass production of steel came about in the 17th century, though steel was made much earlier too. In fact the earliest remnants of steel found in India date back to 300 BC, but these were at a small scale. The mass production of steel has helped shape the industrial revolution in which many components needed for several different machines were made out of steel. Today, there are highly sophisticated methods for steel production that ensure a very high quality without cost escalation – keeping the property of mass production intact.

Today, steel is one of the most commonly used materials in the world and also the most recycled material. This makes it ideal for the future where the world moves towards sustainability and a green future. Structural steel, used in making buildings, was recycled up to 97% in 2007, showing a very high rate of recycling and making it ideal for people who care for the environment.

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Estimating the Costs of Steel and Steel Buildings

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Steel has undergone tremendous changes in prices because of new technological advances that tend to produce better quality metal at lower prices. This is why the housing industry prices also fluctuate quite a lot with the prices of steel. Since the trend has been that the prices go down and the quality of product improves, it is only fair to assume that steel buildings will become highly competitive in the near future.

The usual cost of steel (as of 2009) per ton of steel is about $275 as per the IMF records. The good thing is that steel being extremely strong and durable doesn’t require a whole lot of material during construction. As an example, straight wall steel buildings, which are the more traditional and simple buildings, can today cost as little as $7 per square foot.

Domed buildings are also becoming more and more popular, and these can be even cheaper than the straight walled steel buildings. This is because they use less steel for building and therefore prove to be more economical. One disadvantage is that the available space decreases due to the shape of the dome. Thus there is a trade-off and usually both the options are quite good. Steel buildings are not very expensive to build but offer some of the best quality buildings of today, both in residential and commercial spheres.

The most popular steel buildings are homes, garages, sheds and boat storages in the residential sphere and mini-storage, repair shops, aircraft hangars, offices, commercial buildings, retail buildings and stores and factories in the commercial sphere. It is only possible with steel to offer such diversity and versatility in building – from the very small homes to huge commercial complexes can all contain the same basic building material – steel. This is unprecedented in the history of buildings.

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