Your design advantage

Designing with Formance SIPs offers you three key advantages 

1. The Green Building Advantage

Formance SIPs offer your client improved energy efficiency and indoor air quality. These factors contribute directly to the quality of life of the occupants. Because Formance SIPs are machine cut, the key advantage is their ability to create a tight, high-performance building envelope. The rigid foam core offers continuous insulation across the panels, reducing the thermal bridging that is systematic in traditional frame constructed New Zealand Builds. Due to the air tightness, SIPs offer healthier indoor environment, which is especially important in homes, schools and healthcare facilities.

Because of SIPs high-performance, more design professionals are using them to achieve Passive House standards. These are the standards we believe all New Zealanders deserve. Across the life time of a build, the energy demands can be reduced by 50 to 60 percentage compared to stick framing, reducing load on the National Grid. And, this is before installing photovoltaic or solar heating. 

2. Design Flexibility

Once you understand the basic fundamentals of how the panel build process works, there’s no end of possibility. SIPs were pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s as part of his Usonian design movement. Now, we’re seeing SIPs becoming integral to the likes of the tiny house and pre-fab movements.

Due to it’s high strength to weight ratio, the Formance building system allows designers to push new boundaries of spans and loads and in turn, be more efficient in their use of materials. SIPs make even more sense when you consider New Zealand's rising seismic activity.

The Formance design team is available to support your design ambition by providing technical support and quality assurance with shop drawings.

3. Energy Efficiency

We are now in the generation of clean energy. 34% of New Zealand residential energy consumption is used to heat spaces. The average daily indoor temperature in the winter for most New Zealand houses is just 16°C. This is unacceptable considering the World Health Organisation’s is between 18-21.  R-values only go part of the way to measure energy efficiency. Studies show airtightness has a greater impact on energy efficiency. In fact, air leakage, through poor insulation installation is responsible for 40% energy loss through heat/cooling.

When the factors are considered, Formance makes sense.