The magic is in the walls! Faceted, panelled round and factory-built – MCH building technologies for sustainable homes.
We design every Mandala Custom Homes dwelling to meet all the standards of a high-performance home. Simply put, that means superior, sustainable building technologies, including a fully sealed building envelope – it’s airtight and well-insulated. This is the foundation of our MCH sustainable homes.
Ultimately, the ability of a home to perform well in relation to energy consumption and thermal comfort for a lifetime comes down to the wall systems that create its shell, or building envelope. The performance of this envelope looks to the quality of building materials and the assembly. A home that has not been assembled well, reduces the structure’s ability to conserve heat (or cool) and properly protect the home and its occupants.
A quality, well-built wall system is designed to limit heat, air, and moisture transfer to provide a comfortable indoor environment for years and years to come. Sustainable homes have walls that support performance.
Sustainable homes are air-tight
For most homes, heat loss through uncontrolled air leakage is one of the biggest wastes of energy.
A primary way a wall system provides energy efficiency, sustainability, and comfort is if it is air-tight. An air-tight building envelope, like that of every MCH home, provides adequate fresh air for the occupants and high-efficiency comfort. We achieve this through an efficient wall ventilation system, which uses the warmth of that air on its way out to help heat the fresh air on its way in. Air is unable to penetrate walls, floors, or the roof. This reduces the chances for moisture to collect in or migrate into those spaces, where moulds and bacteria can flourish.
At Mandala Homes, we prioritize an air-tight building envelope. We take the utmost care to detail and design our homes to ensure the tightest seal between the air barrier and the windows and doors. Because a tight seal is so important we go the extra step to provide the necessary detailed instructions to the builder so they can achieve a tight seal between all the building components throughout the off-site installation phase of the building process.
MCH wall system technologies
To achieve the ultimate in air-tight efficiency and comfort we build super-insulated walls. MCH attaches a continuous layer of insulation to the outside of the wall framing, effectively minimizing heat loss through the walls.
Additionally, to prevent moisture, our walls include a rain-screen feature that creates an air-space between the building covering and the siding. This allows the siding or other exterior finish to dry out and the vapour from within the wall to escape.
In the foundation, we recommend homeowners choose ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) to maximize the thermal performance of the basement.
Off-site, panelled manufacturing (OSM) supports sustainable homes
The Off-Site Manufacturing (OSM) system is very beneficial to the process of building effectively sustainable homes. OSM involves pre-building the wall panels, floor and roof components indoors, in a factory. After pre-assembly, we ship the prefab home to the homeowner’s building site as a Home Package for set-up.
There are a variety of benefits to building a home through OSM. For instance, environmentally, there is better quality control during production. There is a much higher degree of precision in the factory with a reduction in materials and resources, resulting in far less waste. In a factory, building materials are protected from the weather. They remain dry and undamaged, retaining their integrity, and result in a higher quality building. An OSM home takes significantly less time to build than a house built on-site.
Once the Home Package arrives at the building site, the pre-built panels and components can be assembled to lock up – weather tight – in only a matter of days. The accelerated construction phase on-site, construction is much faster and has less impact on the surrounding home site environment. MCH’s factory-built construction uses only the finest quality wood products, sourced primarily from forests here in British Columbia. We choose all of our building materials and products based on strength, durability, energy efficiency, non-toxicity, sustainability and beauty.
Questions about the benefits of an MCH custom prefab sustainable home? Speak with an MCH expert to learn more!