Hempcrete In Construction: An Innovation or A Gimmick?

India is a nation that informs its citizens that their most basic needs must be met first. Food, clothing and shelter are examples of fundamental requirements. Owning a house is a wonderful gift, but having built it with your own hard work is an added bonus. 

But constructing one home is a lot of process. Be it from the financial side or from the workload side. Also, traditional construction becomes more expensive because of its inefficiency in using more energy and resources. 

So, industry leaders and scientists conducted tests to find a new solution. It is the solution of using a more eco-friendly and economical material for a longer time. It is known as Hempcrete. 

Hempcrete is a new innovative building material made from a composite of hemp hurds (shives), lime, and sand. When these ingredients blend in water, a chemical reaction that sets the binder and glues the hurds particles together creates a material ready for construction. 

But there are lots of sides to it. Also, this Hempcrete is just a new innovative material for your construction. Therefore, there will always be a need for a traditional construction process like excavating for the foundation. Therefore, a backhoe loader is the best choice for this step. For example, backhoe loaders from Tata Hitachi are the perfect option. According to its specifications and capabilities, the Tata Hitachi price list provides you with the best value possible. 

Origin of Hempcrete material 

Hempcrete is another innovative process that has its roots back in the timeline. This process was first commenced in France in the era of 1990s. Since then, this process has found its way to reach all over the world. From constructing your new building to renovating your space. 

With the growing popularity of Hempcrete use, this material finally found its way to India with the help of a couple in Uttarakhand that used Hempcrete to build their home in 2021. With this material, the couple could meet their dream of having a shelter for just Rs. 30 lakhs. 

The use of this material is, for now, only successful with a couple of methods. These methods consist of using cast over Hempcrete brick to place them on the construction site. Another technique is using prefabricated hempcrete blocks for your construction. Finally, with once implemented between timber framing, plaster can be added to increase its strength and aesthetics. 

Advantages of using Hempcrete material 

Using Hempcrete is quite economical but on the longer period side. As it consumes fewer resources and energy with less wastage makes this material a better option for growing towards eco-friendly construction. 

So, let’s go into the advantages of using this material in the future construction of your new home or renovation of your old one. 

Economical Insulation 

This is the first advantage of using Hempcrete blocks in your construction. However, this is a different advantage as it will only help in colder regions of India. 

As we know, Hempcrete is not just any usual material for your construction. They are made up of natural materials that help create a better insulation system for your house. Because of the origin of its key ingredients, it is more likely to be affordable than other insulating materials available in the market. 

Excellent Moisture Handling 

Hempcrete is a unique material composed of plant-based as its key ingredients. It includes wood fibre, cellulose, straw bale, clay, cotton, etc. This creates an ability to maintain moisture during humid conditions. 

These natural ingredients have pores inside of them, allowing them to absorb moisture inside, also for a longer period. This, in turn, enables you to have a cool home during hot and humid seasons. This will result in less consumption of air conditioning appliances inside your home. 

Improves Structural Strength 

Hempcrete includes all-natural ingredients that are compressed to give it a shape of a concrete block used for construction. Its brief manufacturing methods show its high strength capacity to support your building.

Also, it is not that powerful to support the roof load. So, to cover this gap, applying cast around walls framing can bring good results for a strong structure.

The rigidity of Hempcrete insulation makes this a perfect substrate for plaster. In essence, this allows you to increase the strength without using mesh or other bonding agents. 

Eco-friendly in Nature

Hempcrete is an eco-friendly building material. Yes, you heard it right! The key ingredients of the Hempcrete come from the farm. To start, the dry powdered lime binder can generate a lot of dust during mixing. 

Therefore, adequate breathing protection is a must for anybody handling dry ingredients. Once wet, the lime binder is mildly caustic to the skin, so rubber gloves and measures to fully cover the skin are mandatory. 

After all, once placed in the walls, this doesn’t create or give any gases inside the building. Also, lime being antimicrobial and antifungal, creates a better environment decreasing the risk of bacteria inside the home. 

Fire Resistant 

Several homemade videos claim that Hempcrete of not a fire-resistant building material. But, as the certified tests conducted around the globe by scientists. The results have met all the standards for being the perfect alternative with quite an exceptional fire-resistant capability. 

So, using this material as your primary building ingredient can bring a safety shield for you and your loved ones. As seen, there are a lot of fire outbreaks, short circuits and several fire-causing situations. So, this material can add up to your safety measure. 

Conclusion 

To conclude and validate the above statements, the Hempcrete material is a bit of new construction for India. But, this material brings a lot of positive measures that add up to your benefits in the longer run. 

This material can also reduce the waste and use of resources more than needed. This way, an individual or a construction company can save money and time with increased efficiency. 

But, other procedures and steps into construction will still require traditional methods. Therefore, companies can use their spare money to buy new heavy machinery equipment. 

This way, you improve your accuracy and efficiency and gain more profits. For this, you can look for a backhoe loader with high capabilities and high efficiency with being light over your pocket. Therefore, backhoe loaders which are priced like JCB price list can add more value to your investments.