BRE Certification

PolySteel UK is keen to produce a quality product and give its customers the confidence to know that the quality standard for the PolySteel products will maintain a measured quality at all times.

The Building Research Establishment (BRE) was asked to carry out the assessment and certification process.  PolySteel UK wished to have its products tested to the highest of standards so a special testing site was found in Frampton-On-Severn, Gloucestershire.  Structures were built according to the BRE guidelines and concrete was poured with different types of mixes and heights and tests were then carried out on those structures.

Assessment is an on-going process and BRE continually checks the quality met meets the required quality standard which has been approved in the quality document.

BRE made this statement “PolySteel PSI-4000 Series (specifically PSI-4600 & PSI-4800) Flat Wall forms have been assessed to confirm, within limitations, their suitability as a permanent Insulating Concrete Formwork (ICF) system. The forms of the system can be partly assembled off site (panelised) or fully assembled on site (in-situ) to produce a permanent formwork (shuttering), which is filled with a defined concrete mix and steel reinforcement where required. The resultant concrete walls with expanded polystyrene (EPS) panels either side can be used as either load-bearing or non load-bearing insulated walls in residential or commercial buildings. Only walls where the height of the top floor above ground, in a building or separated part of a building, is not more than 18m are covered by this report”.

“The tests for BRE were challenging in the extreme,” says Paul Boyce, Managing Director of PolySteel “and we went way beyond the normal specifications for ICF to show just how robust – and flexible – the system is. The tests applied to PolySteel were some of the hardest yet for an ICF and we believe we have set new standards for this type of construction method, opening the way to the system being adopted by more contractors across the country”

He added “more recently test walls have been constructed with PolySteel’s multi dimensional form, Poly-pro which features a plastic tie insert. These were built across the range of widths available and concrete was successfully poured to a height of 3.6m (12ft).  We demonstrated that these have the capacity to have a central core from 4 inches to a full two feet in width – the widest forms ever poured from this height and expect BRE certification for Poly-pro to be received very soon”

The insulated concrete industry in the UK will benefit from the prestige of this BRE certification process.

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