How to Make Steel Buildings More Energy Efficient

Steel buildings are a green choice. They’re energy efficient in many ways. The materials for steel buildings are nearly always 100 percent recycled and recyclable, reducing the strain on the Earth’s natural resources. Pre-fabricated and pre-engineered steel buildings are also produced more efficiently than wood and masonry buildings, and because they’re all delivered in one shipment, they also put less of a strain on the Earth in the delivery process. All in all, steel buildings are already the ecologically sound choice when you’re putting up a new building.

However, there are a number of things you can do to make steel buildings even more energy efficient and Earth-friendly than they already are.

Insulate Your Metal Building

Uninsulated steel may be weather tight, but it has a high rate of heat transfer or conductivity. Whether you live in a climate that gets exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold, you’ll want to invest in good insulation for your steel building. Many steel buildings are designed to make installation of insulation as easy as putting panels into place before closing up the interior walls. Keep in mind that metal buildings without insulation are more prone to trapping moisture and vapor, so insulating your steel building serves more than one purpose. With proper insulation, steel buildings are far more energy efficient, saving you money by reducing the energy used for heating and cooling.

Use Renewable Energy

Steel buildings offer the ideal platform for renewable energy systems. Solar panels can be easily mounted on the roof. If you prefer, you can use solar thermal energy to heat water and heat the building at the same time. By choosing renewable systems for your energy use, you can reduce your utility costs by as much as 50 percent.

Choose an Energy Efficient Roof

The roof you choose for your steel building can make a very big difference in the amount of energy needed to keep your building’s temperature comfortable. Most metal building suppliers offer a number of different qualities of energy efficient roofs from which you can choose. If you live in an area where the temperatures are generally high and your major utility expense is for cooling, choose a light-colored reflective roof to minimize your energy costs. If you live in a region where the winters are cold and there’s significant snowfall, choose a dark roof which will absorb and retain heat and contribute to snow melt.

In addition to these fairly standard ways of increasing the energy efficiency of steel buildings, keep your eyes peeled for new developments. Over the next few years, for example, technological advances in solar power may bring solar paint to the market, making it possible to paint steel buildings with color that will also supply renewable solar energy to power your appliances and lights.

Skylights for Your Steel Buildings

When you choose a steel building for your construction project, you have a lot of options for finishing. Among the most important choices you’ll make if you’ll be using your steel building for any sort of occupancy – including as a workplace, home office or animal shelter – is the type of windows you’ll install. Skylights are one of the better ways to provide natural light in steel buildings that will be occupied by people for any length of time. These are just a few of the benefits of choosing skylights for your steel building construction project.

Natural Light

Natural light is healthy. It’s a proven scientific fact that full-spectrum natural light provides health benefits. Natural light from skylights can help prevent eyestrain by allowing the eyes to focus with less effort. Because skylights bring light into your steel building from one of the highest points, there are fewer shadows and more even, consistent light. In addition, natural light helps combat depression and improves mood, leading to a healthier, more productive work environment.

More Light

Skylights provide more light than conventional windows because the light is entering your building at the most natural angle. You’ll also benefit from the longest period of direct sunlight through your skylights, because windows set into the ceiling or roof of your building aren’t dependent on direction for direct sunlight.

Better Aesthetics

While it may seem to be a minor point, particularly if your building is for utility, skylights allow a view of the sky which make your building feel more open and spacious. This can be especially appealing in a steel building, which already provides completely unobstructed interior space. When you install skylights in steel buildings, their effect isn’t necessarily confined to a single room but can be viewed from anywhere in the building.

Save Electricity

Because skylights provide more natural light than conventional windows, you use less energy to light your building. Steel buildings are already among the most energy efficient structures you can build. When you add skylights, you make them even more energy efficient. In addition to using less energy for lighting with skylights, you’ll also be reducing your use of energy for heat because the sun helps warm the interior of your steel building.

Style

There are many styles of skylights available specifically for use in steel buildings. If you decide to take advantage of the benefits provided by one or more skylights in your metal building, be sure to choose windows that are manufactured specifically for that purpose and ensure that your contractor knows how to install them properly. Enjoy your steel building even more when you choose skylights to help enhance them.

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Buying Steel Buildings

Garages, barns, storage buildings, home offices and workshops – they all have one thing in common. Steel buildings are among the best choices when you need one. Buying steel buildings looks easy, but you should put at least as much effort into choosing the right metal building and metal building supplier as you do when buying a new car. Here are five mistakes to avoid when you’re evaluating, sourcing and buying steel buildings.

Failing to Do the Necessary Research

Before you go out shopping for a steel building, it’s important to understand the typical process for ordering and buying steel buildings. It’s not as easy as heading out to the nearest home improvement store and picking out a storage building on the lot. It’s important that you understand exactly what you’re buying and what you’ll need to supply in order to complete erecting your new metal building when it arrives. If you’re not familiar with the ordering and purchase process, you could find yourself with a steel building you can’t put up or with a truck sitting on the street outside your house waiting for you to unload your building – and no one to help you do it.

Buying a “Once-In-A-Lifetime Bargain”

When you start shopping around for steel buildings through various suppliers, you’ll notice that there’s a wide variation in prices. It may be tempting to go after that low-priced, good-looking building – but be careful of what you buy. Very low-priced steel buildings are often made of substandard materials or won’t include some of the necessary components. Remember, you get what you pay for. If someone is selling steel buildings for a lot cheaper than others suppliers, you’re probably best off avoiding them.

Letting Yourself Be Pressured Into Buying On the Spot

Unfortunately, when a product is as popular as steel buildings are, bad actors come out of the woodwork. Some suppliers of steel buildings apply high-pressure sales tactics to try to get you to buy without doing the necessary research to make sure you’re getting the building you want and need. If a salesman tells you that he can give you a special price, but only if you buy today or that he just happens to have a metal building on the lot that’s perfect for your needs, hang up the phone and find a broker or steel buildings supplier that will deal with you honestly and fairly.

Not Checking the Local Building Codes Before You Sign a Contract

Every region in the U.S. has building codes and standards to which your new steel building will need to adhere. A reputable supplier of steel buildings understands this and will ensure that you supply the necessary paperwork and building codes from your city or county so that the manufacturer can engineer your building to meet your local codes.

Buying Without Checking References

Before you make a final decision, make sure you check references on the steel building supplier you’re choosing to work with. Ask for references and ask the suppliers if they’ve sold other buildings in the area that you can visit to check the quality of the construction. While you’re at it, check the Better Business Bureau for any records of complaints on the suppliers you’re considering.

One of the best ways to avoid running into major problems when you buy steel buildings is to place your order with a supplier of steel buildings that is used to working with non-industry customers. A knowledgeable, helpful steel building broker can lead you through the process and make sure you that your purchase goes smoothly.

Five Ways Steel Buildings Save You Money

All around the country, steel buildings are cropping up in the most unusual places. They’re one of the most popular choices for homeowners who want to replace or build garages, and they make great barns and grain storage buildings on farms. Small steel buildings are ideal for use as home workshops and offices when outfitted with plumbing, interior finishing and electricity, and larger buildings are being used around the country as houses of worship, warehouses, factory buildings and retail stores. What’s the major attraction of steel buildings? While there are a number benefits to metal buildings, the bottom line is most often the bottom line. In nearly every way and at every stage of their usable lives, steel buildings are the economical choice. Here are five ways that steel buildings save you money from start to finish.

More Affordable to Buy

Steel is nearly always the most affordable building material available, so you start out with less expensive materials from the very beginning. The manufacturing process is designed to be cost-efficient, with all the engineering done in a computer program before a single piece of steel is extruded or cut. With the help of computer programs, there’s very little wasted material, making steel buildings cheaper to buy than most other types of buildings.

More Affordable to Build

Steel buildings are ready to erect when they arrive on site. There’s no need to measure and cut anything. You don’t have to frame anything or dig a foundation. In fact, all you have to do is bolt the pieces to the foundation and to each other, then do the finish work. That means you’re only paying a construction crew for days instead of weeks or weeks instead of months – unless, of course, you choose to do the work yourself, in which case your metal building costs you even less to erect.

More Affordable to Maintain

A wooden building will require scraping and repainting every four to five years in order to stay looking fresh and new. A concrete building will require sandblasting and cleaning periodically to deal with the effects and staining of the environment. A metal building, on the other hand, generally comes with a corrosion-resistant powder color coating that’s guaranteed for 20 years or more. In most cases, the only maintenance you’ll need to do for the building exterior is a thorough power-wash a couple of times a year to remove debris and dirt.

More Affordable to Manage

In addition to standard maintenance costs, you’ll also spend less on energy for your new steel building. Most steel buildings today are manufactured to exacting high-efficiency energy standards. They often include high-energy efficiency roofs and are specifically designed to make them easy to insulate. Those savings add up to a considerable amount over the course of a few decades.

More Affordable to Demolish

Finally, if and when you decide to remove your steel building, demolition will be far less expensive. In fact, because you can simply deconstruct the building, you can even sell it and have the buyer take it apart and put it together again on his own site. If you actually demolish the building, though, the metal can be sold for recycling, greatly defraying the cost of demolition.

As you can see, steel buildings are not only more economical to buy and build, but will save you money throughout their usable lives and beyond. Why would you choose another type of construction when steel buildings offer so many advantages?

Five Reasons Steel Buildings Are the Better Choice

Why do people choose steel buildings over wood or concrete construction for barns, garages and storage buildings? There are many reasons that a metal building is the right choice for small-scale buildings like garages and barns. These are just five of them.

The Economical Choice

Steel is one of the most affordable building materials as a general rule, but the material is only one of the reasons that steel buildings are more affordable than other types of construction. Because the components for steel garages and barns are delivered ready to assemble, you spend far less money on construction costs. You don’t need a full basement foundation in most cases, cutting costs even further. In short, a metal building is more affordable than a wooden or concrete structure.

The Faster Choice

A steel building goes up faster than a wooden frame construction because it is fabricated offsite and delivered ready to assemble. Small buildings like garages can often be put up in just one or two workdays. Larger buildings take more time, but they still take less than half the time of erecting a wood-frame building on site.

The Easier Choice

Metal building kits are the best choice for do-it-yourself construction. Once the components of a steel building are fabricated, putting them together is no more complicated than following the instructions for a giant Erector set. You don’t need special equipment. In most cases, you can assemble a small workshop or storage building with standard power tools and the help of a few friends.

The Earth-Friendly Choice

Steel buildings are the most ecologically friendly choice in most cases. The steel used in fabricating a metal building is usually 100 percent recycled, so your new building won’t be using more natural resources. Instead, you’ll be reusing materials and saving them from the landfills, making it a win on both ends of the construction cycle. In addition, the tight construction of steel buildings makes them much more economical to heat and cool than traditional construction, saving both money and energy.

The Smart Choice

Finally, metal buildings require very little in the way of ongoing maintenance. Steel building components are generally finished with a powder-coating of weatherproof, corrosion-proof and fade-proof color that won’t need repainting for up to 20 years. In that same amount of time, you might have to repaint wood garages or barns four or five times. In general, steel buildings require little more care than a hose down with a pressure washer once or twice a year.

Steel buildings are the smart choice for many residential and commercial uses. If you’re planning on putting up a new garage, home office, storage building or other structure, consider the many benefits and advantages of a metal building.

Stylish Storage with Steel Buildings

Steel buildings have rapidly become the solution of choice when homeowners need additional storage on their properties. Whether they need a metal building to house their lawn and garden equipment, garages, barns or just a basic storage building to hold their off-season lawn and patio furniture, more and more homeowners are turning to steel buildings to fulfill those needs. And more than ever, steel buildings are becoming more stylish and fashionable in order to fit in with their residential surroundings.

While you can still purchase the old-fashioned Quonset buildings that most people still envision when they thing of steel buildings, today’s metal storage buildings and garages are a far cry from those squat, plain buildings that came home from the war with the soldiers. Instead, homeowners who are looking for affordable storage and space additions to their property have an array of attractive options to choose from. Here’s a quick rundown of the types of steel buildings you’ll find on the market for use on residential properties.

Quonset Buildings

As noted, you can still purchase Quonset buildings, the style of metal building that was a popular choice for agricultural uses across the Midwest and the West. The metal hoop construction used for these steel buildings is among the most stable styles available. The sloped sides shed snow and tend to stand up to the worst winds that sweep across the plains and grasslands. Unlike the bare metal models available after the war, however, today’s Quonset buildings are often available in a variety of colors and include trim options that make them far more attractive than their older relatives.

P-Style Steel Buildings

One of the drawbacks of Quonset buildings is that the sloped walls reduce the available floor space along the interior walls. P-style steel buildings combine the hoop construction used in Q-buildings with straight walls, providing more usable space and more headroom along the interior walls, while retaining the stability of the rounded roof. It’s not unusual to see these buildings fitted with garagestyle overhead doors or rolling barn doors and used as garages or for equipment storage.

A-Style Steel Buildings

Homeowners who want the most attractive steel buildings typically opt for A-style steel buildings. These buildings have straight walls and a pitched roof, making them the most similar in appearance to traditional houses. Because of their appearance, they tend to be more welcome in residential subdivisions where appearance is important.

In addition to these basic styles, you can work with a manufacturer of steel buildings to design a custom-engineered steel building that suits your needs and desires. Considering the many advantages and the affordability of building with steel, a metal building is nearly always your best choice for storage buildings, garages and other residential outbuildings on your property.

Four Tips for Choosing Steel Buildings

Once you’ve decided that a steel building is the right choice for your building project, you’re still faced with an array of choices to make before you can place your order. Steel buildings come in many different sizes and styles, and are available from dozens of suppliers, manufacturers and brokers. The decisions you make before you place your order for a metal building will make the difference in how well your new building meets your needs. Consider these tips for choosing and ordering steel buildings before you make your final decision.

Check with Your Local Building and Code Office

Every region has its own standards and codes for steel buildings and other structures. Before you set your heart on a specific style or type of steel building, check with your local building and code office to find out what codes and standards your building will have to meet. In fact, some communities don’t allow steel buildings at all. The last thing you want is to put a non-refundable deposit down on a steel building only to find out that you can’t erect it on your site because of local codes.

Measure Your Building Site Carefully

Using the building codes you got from the building and code authority, carefully measure the site where you want to build. Make sure that you take into account any easements or frontage requirements that your city or community requires. Once you’ve deducted the square footage you need to provide between buildings and between properties, you’ll have a good idea of the largest size your new steel building can be.

Decide Between Working with a Fabricator or Broker

You can buy a metal building directly from a fabricator or manufacturer, or you can place your order through a broker or distributor. There are benefits and drawbacks to each choice. If you order directly from the manufacturer, for example, you’ll cut out the costs of the middleman, but you need to be knowledgeable about the manufacturing and ordering process. If you work with a broker who is used to working with inexperienced buyers, you’ll get the benefit of the company’s knowledge and assistance throughout the ordering process.

Get an Experienced Contractor

If you’ve never put up a steel building before, you may do better hiring an experienced contractor to do the work. Even if you plan on doing the actual assembly yourself, consider hiring a contractor to pour the concrete slab for your building. Getting the slab right is essential to getting your metal building erected properly.

Steel buildings are the smart choice for garages, barns, storage buildings, home workshops and nearly any other type of home expansion or construction project. Take advantage of the experience and knowledge of brokers and manufacturers to make sure you get the perfect metal building for your needs.

Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions with Steel Buildings

Are you committed to getting organized this year? Have you made a New Year’s resolution to get in shape and work out more often? Are you determined to spend more time enjoying your hobbies or put more effort into your home business this year? If your New Year’s resolutions sound like any of those, steel buildings may make it easier for you to keep them. Seriously. Consider these different ways that you can use a steel building.

Organize Your Stuff

Aside from garages and barns, the most common use for small, residential steel buildings is storage. If you’ve made a resolution to get your STUFF organized and tidied up, a metal building is your best friend. You can choose from metal buildings in a nearly unlimited array of sizes, colors and styles that will provide you with all the room you need to store your off-season clothing and home goods, your holiday decorations, your outdoor patio furniture and all the stuff you use to keep your lawn and garden in shape.  Along the same lines, a steel building can help you keep your resolution to keep your house neater and cleaner in the coming year, too.

Get Your Body in Shape

You know how it is. You intend to go to the gym three times a week and get in those hours of working out but the gym is so far away and you have to, you know, get dressed to go there. Make it easier to work out by building your very own on-premises workout room in a steel building. You can actually build your own personal gym for not much more than the cost of a high-end gym membership. It’s a lot harder to make excuses to stay away from the gym when the gym is right there outside your back door.

Increase Your Productivity

If you work at home, you know that one of the biggest drains on your productivity is being at home. People drop by. The telephone rings. Your children demand your attention. And seriously, those dishes really do need to be done before you settle down to get your work done, right? Productivity specialists say that one of the best ways to enforce an “I’m at work now” mentality is to actually go to an office every day. Steel buildings are the ideal alternative to taking over the dining room or extra bedroom as a home office. When you erect a metal building to serve as your home office, you’ll get all the benefits of “going to work” while still being available to your family if they need you.

Those are just a few ways that steel buildings can help you keep your New Year’s resolutions. How can a metal building help you have a better year this year?