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Impact-resistant Glass for Windows and Doors of Steel Building

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Impact-resistant glass is the last type of protection for windows and doors of steel buildings. This practically eliminates the need for hurricane shutters. Installing impact-resistant glass is actually more expensive especially for old steel buildings.

The idea of using shatter-resistant glass for windows and doors of buildings and residences was inspired by the use of laminated glass by the automotive industry. Impact-resistant glass doors and windows offer permanent protection from storms. However, they must be installed by professionals.

There are two common types of impact-resistant glass for windows and doors. The first kind is laminated glass consisting of a shatter-proof membrane sandwiched between two sheets of glass. Upon impact, the glass may shatter but not scatter. The inner membrane will hold the two sheets of glass firmly together. Thus, the barrier is not broken.

Laminated glass windows and doors are designed to handle wind-borne debris and repeated impact from unwanted intruders. The thickness of the interior lamination ranges from .015 inch to .090 inch. The inner film even comes in a variety of color tints to choose from.

The second type of impact-resistant glass for steel buildings uses shatter-resistant film placed over the glass to keep the shards in place if broken. Since these films are just applied to the glazing, they may not function as a complete system and may not offer the protection required.

Impact-resistant glass installed in steel buildings, not only provide safety and protection from damages caused by storms but also security from intruders. In addition, it also offers increased sound and sunlight control. The strength and quality of the glass actually reduces the amount of exterior noise and ultraviolet rays of the sun, which can make their way into the building. The color tint also helps to reduce or eliminate sun fade and ultraviolet damage for interiors of steel buildings.

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A Steel Building for Your New Home

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Your home holds many sentimental values – memories of many “firsts” as a newlywed couple and the children’s growing-up years. However, these precious memories may now be overshadowed by the need for more space for a growing family.

A good way to envision your new home is to gather inspiration from magazines, trade fairs, or straight from the suppliers. For a more realistic vision of your next dwelling, consider your current financial capabilities and priorities.

Write down your ideas on paper and translate these into a solid plan. Define the specifications of your dream home. How many floors will it have? How many bedrooms does your family need?

Consider prefabricated steel buildings as a better alternative to more traditional construction methods because they offer a lot of benefits.

First, a prefabricated steel building is manufactured offsite and delivered to the construction site where it is erected. This quality increases the speed, accuracy, and quality of construction, to enable your family to enjoy your new home at the least amount of time.

Second, the installation of insulation and the availability of a lot of finishing options make steel buildings a better choice. Your steel building can be finished with any type of exterior of your choice – brick, stucco, siding, and a lot more – to achieve the look of traditional wood-framed house.

Third, steel buildings are environment friendly. Steel can be recycled over and over again without losing its strength and properties. Insulating your steel building makes it energy efficient, reducing energy consumption and costs.

Prefabricated steel buildings are strong, durable and virtually maintenance free. In addition, the many environmental and economical benefits of steel construction provide a lot of savings in time and money, as well as, protection and conservation of the earth’s natural resources.

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Environmentally Friendly Steel Buildings (continuation)

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Last post talked about steel as the most recyclable material in the world, making steel buildings environment-friendly. The steel industry has found that it is more economical to recycle steel than to produce new ones since recycling saves about 75% of its annual energy consumption. This amount is equivalent to the annual energy consumption of about eighteen million homes.

An added advantage of building with steel is that in the construction phase of steel buildings, there is very little waste produced because the steel components were fabricated to precise specifications based on the design. If there are any waste materials produced during construction and even in the demolition of the whole structure, they will not end up in a landfill because they can be recycled.

The online encyclopedia gives a detailed example of how environmentally friendly steel buildings are, with this statement: For a typical 2,000-square-foot two-story house using a steel frame is equivalent to about six recycled cars, while a comparable wooden frame house may require as many as 40-50 trees.

Another characteristic of steel buildings that make them environment-friendly is that they pose no danger of contaminating nature. Unlike wooden structures, steel frame members are not treated with toxic chemicals to protect the metal structures from termites, vermin, and rot.

These are more than enough reasons why steel buildings are popular these days. Choosing to build with steel rather than wood or any other construction material is equivalent to doing your share in saving the environment.

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The Sustainability Benefits of Steel

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Steel has demonstrated its ability to be a sustainable construction material. The dictionary defines something sustainable as one which endures or keeps going continuously. Steel does not lose its properties even after recycling. You will be amazed to know that the sustainable benefits of steel are realized in every aspect of a steel building’s lifetime.

The inherent characteristics of steel that make it sustainable include:
1. Low waste material
2. Flexible
3. Offsite manufacture
4. Speed in construction
5. Resource efficiency
6. Adaptable
7. Long lasting appeal
8. Safe
9. Reusable
10. Recyclable

The use of steel in construction is fast and safe. The reduced construction time translates to lower costs, quicker return on investments, and less disruption to the lives of the local folks. Steel offers no unpleasant surprises because of its predictability. The components of the metal structure are manufactured in a safe, factory environment and delivered to the construction site on an agreed time.

What’s more, the limited waste material during construction can be easily returned to the steel supply chain to be recycled. Steel is also lighter when compared to wood and has a high strength to weight ratio.

After construction, a steel building offers an environment that is light, open, airy, and adaptable. Your steel building will not deteriorate and decay. Instead, it will mature gracefully with age. The long clear spans of a steel building’ allow for easy modifications. Expanding an old steel building is also not a problem because steel frames can be easily adapted and reconfigured, breathing new life into it.

Now you may ask, what happens to steel at the end of life? Does it still retain its sustainable benefits? Yes, of course. Metal buildings are reusable as a whole or in parts. A whole steel building can be dismantled and re-erected somewhere else. Individual parts can be reused, as well. If these two options are not realized, the steel can be recycled and used in another construction elsewhere.

Steel is not the only construction material that is recycled. What makes it different from all the rest is that it can be recycled over and over again without losing its performance and inherent properties. This is referred to as indefinite recycling or multicycling. Steel will always have a value and none of it will ever be disposed of intentionally to a landfill.

Indeed, the sustainability benefits of steel make your steel building a very valuable investment, from its construction to its demolition.

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Hybrid Steel Buildings for Design Flexibility

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Steel buildings are not only strong and sturdy structures but they can actually be customized to provide hundreds of thousands of different possible designs. Steel buildings can be highly flexible in the aspect of design and sky is the limit for the creativity involving steel buildings and the design aspects. You can get some really amazing and aesthetic designs with steel buildings, depending on the purpose of your building. If you are interested in some great designs for your building, then you should consider hybrid steel buildings.

Hybrid buildings combine both steel and wood to gain from both these widely used construction materials and get the best of both worlds. Hybrid buildings can look just like any traditional building but at a fraction of the cost and they can include many more desirable features. By combining both metal and wood, one can get a strong sturdy structure with finer details made of wood in the traditional form. Hybrid steel buildings can also save a lot on the construction costs.

Hybrid steel buildings also provide a lot of flexibility in the building requirements. Every building has its own unique purpose and requirements and if you talk with your steel contractor about hybrid buildings, he should be able to help you out to design the right hybrid structure. Hybrid structures combine harmoniously the design and engineering aspects of construction, thus never having to compromise on the structure for the design aspect of the building. This helps hybrid buildings provide a great way for buildings that are both internally strong and externally beautiful.

Hybrid buildings have been adopted by some very good developers and many big companies that require precisely these qualities of strength and aesthetics combined. The great flexibility is only the icing on the cake so you can design the perfect building you have always wanted.

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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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Why Choose Steel?

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

There are many construction materials out there that you can use to build a building – your home, office, commercial complex or anything. Why then, should you consider steel? Is it just another construction material that is a passing fad or is it here to stay? The answer is, steel is a very fundamental ingredient of all future construction activities, and this is not because it is in vogue today, but because its fundamentals as a construction material are so strong that it is hard, in fact impossible to replace steel. With a plethora of advantages that steel offers, you should definitely consider steel seriously if you are serious about a high quality structure that will stand the test of time.

To see why and how steel forms the basis of strong and sturdy structures is not difficult. It is highly durable and strong, with a high strength to weight ratio. What this means is that to provide a given stability to your structure or building you will need far less quantities of steel than other building material. In addition, you can use a steel to provide for extra strength if you live in an area prone to say cyclones or typhoons. This is not always possible with other construction materials because there is a limit to how much material you can use. However, since a small quantity of steel also provides high strength, a little more can be added to provide the perfect structure that is stable and ready to meet any challenges.

Steel buildings end up being cheaper than almost all other conventional building types. They are easy to maintain and seldom require maintenance. Steel is also very amenable to prefabrication or pre-engineering, which is a way to build faster and efficient structures in the shortest of time frames. Affordability and strength combine to give steel the advantage that other materials can never compete with.

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Saving Money with Steel Building Insulation

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Steel buildings have a plethora of advantages like strength, efficiency and cost. However, their real advantage comes not only from a lower total building cost but also a lower operating cost. The best way to utilize this is to ensure proper insulation of your steel building so that you can save on your monthly heating bills.

Insulation helps in reducing condensation, convection and radiant heat loss from your steel building and can reduce temperature. An added advantage of most types of insulation today is that they also reduce noise and make your building sound proof to a good extent.

The most commonly used insulation method for steel buildings is fiberglass insulation. It acts as a blanket over your structure, thereby preventing energy loss. The thickness of this insulation layer greatly determines the efficiency of the insulation. A facing material needs to be used with this type of insulation, depending on the temperature conditions of your place.

Reflective insulation is also a preferred method of insulation that especially reduces radiative heat losses. It thus maintains a natural temperature inside your steel building. This type of insulation is made up of an outer layer of aluminum and an inner layer of some inert passive material that is a poor heat conductor. The most commonly used inner material is polyethylene or plastic because they are cheap and efficient. The good thing with reflective insulation is that it works well in both summers and winters, which means it acts like a natural temperature regulator and is simple to maintain.

Finally, spray insulation is a special method for insulation of steel buildings that has a number of other advantages like moisture prevention and additional fire protection. The steel surfaces of your building are sprayed with this special spray that is made up of polyvinyl alcohol or polyurethane in most cases.

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Going Green & Saving Money: Metal Buildings

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Let’s face it, in today’s world the competition is cut throat, and in order to survive, you need to outperform your competitors and make yourself unique in some way. This is not very easy, especially for the smaller start up companies who do not have a whole lot of capital to use to carve out a niche for themselves. However, they now have a wonderful tool at their disposal – going green.

Consumers and businesses are becoming more and more eco-conscious. This is where you can cash in. Of course, the first thing for you to do is to lead the way, and what better way to do this than going green with your steel building!

Steel buildings are one of the most environmentally friendly buildings ever made. Coupled with a plethora of other advantages, steel buildings are simply the best choice for any business. Unlike the more traditional buildings, steel buildings do not require you to cut down forests for wood. Also, traditional buildings take up huge quantities of water, which is a very precious natural resource. Steel buildings, on the other hand, require almost no water for their completion. This makes steel buildings especially good and green for the environment.

By going for steel buildings, you now have a way to attract the right niche of customers who care for the environment and want to get involved with a company that does so too. This is bound to give you a competitive edge over the other companies, and you can quickly use it as a differentiator between your business and the rivals.

Steel buildings, apart from helping you go green, come with tons of other benefits, being the strongest and toughest building materials that are fireproof and all-weather resistant, so you just cannot miss the bargain with so many good things with steel buildings.

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Go Green: Steel Buildings!

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Going green isn’t a fad or a passing fashion. It is true that sustainability is going to define the world in the coming decades and not overconsumption as has been the case up to now. This is why you need to think and act smart, so that you can adapt to the future. As a responsible world citizen, it is your duty to ensure that you do your part in this era of sustainability where we only consume what we require.

Traditional building has always been an overconsumption of resources. With one home, you could have a carbon footprint that may take generations together to neutralize. This is why if you are eco-conscious and want to help save the world, you need to look for greener options. The best of these is steel housing.

Traditional housing has always involved lots of wood. This came from cutting down forests. One single house is thus responsible for increasing carbon dioxide by several tons each year, which the forest would have otherwise absorbed. Also think of the future of the world from the trees that would have given several tons of oxygen to the world.

With steel buildings, you don’t need to worry about wood consumption because you don’t need any. In addition, water is a very precious natural resource, with billions of people still unable to get access to clean drinking water while we waste away millions of liters of it on our housing. With steel buildings, however, you need no water during construction and very little water during the making of the raw materials.

Getting into steel buildings is certainly in your own interests too, since we all share the planet. In addition, as a business, you can use this as a selling point to attract customers, as people grow more and more eco-conscious.

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