Beat the heat, one block at a time

Fireproof building blocks are really cool

HOT OR COLD, it doesn’t matter what end of the heat spectrum you’re coming from: too much of either can be a bad thing. That said, keeping our homes within the habitable “goldilocks zone” during our hot summers has already become a financial burden for many South Africans and it’s only going to get worse. It’s a double whammy, because as global warming pushes temperatures up, so our electricity tariffs escalate. It’s the worst nightmare for any lover of air conditioning.

You probably haven’t got a fancy offgrid home, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your dwelling more thermally efficient and save some hard-earned cash. Like spending it on Stumbelbloc’s affordable DIY building block, which is so thermally efficient it boasts a 60-minute fireproof rating. Blocking cold just as effectively as it does heat, it provides homeowners, farmers and companies renovating buildings with an affordable building solution that allows them to cut down on future heating and cooling costs.

Stumbelbloc’s Andre Esterhuizen tells the story: “As our fireproof blocks are 12 times more thermally efficient than conventional cavity brick walling, they have many applications: from resisting intense flames for an hour to keeping homes and stored perishable items cool when it’s blistering hot outside. Being such great insulators, they also work the other way around, efficiently trapping heat inside during winter, too.”

Each block weighs 6 kg (or about onethird the weight of a normal concrete block). Using them to build costs about the same as erecting drywall.

Like Stumbelbloc’s standard building blocks, the fireproof blocks feature the company’s same unique patented interlocking profiles. Like grown-up Lego blocks, they help make building a more accurate process and can be made onsite using plastic moulds or purchased ready-made.

One thing Esterhuizen couldn’t do when perfecting his top-secret fireproof perlite mix (which gets added to the standard block aggregate) was make the blocks load-bearing. However, as an experienced builder, he doesn’t see this as a problem and wouldn’t hesitate to construct an entire home out of them. “I would just put in concrete support columns and use the blocks for shuttering, then fill all the blocks under trusses with concrete.”

Instead of using mortar, all Stumbelbloc variants are bonded together using Blockgrip. It sets in three hours, and is applied by simply dipping their bases into the mix, making the construction process at least 10 times quicker, less messier and significantly cheaper than conventional methods. In fact, a typical day’s construction is said to result in less than one barrowload of waste.  To find out more, contact Andre Esterhuizen on 083 228 8036 or visit www.stumbelbloc.com