Epoxy coated rebar looked promising for a while, but it's on the way out. Water gets in at cuts and joints. So all field joints have to have field patching.
There is a great comparison. Two piers were built in the 1940s, side by side, one with carbon steel rebar, one with stainless steel rebar.[1] Go look.
[1] https://worldstainless.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ref19_...
[1] https://worldstainless.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ref19_...
That's an understatement. Fiberglass (GFRP) tops out at roughly US$ 2.50/foot, while SS can get up to $9:
* https://www.wellcoindustries.com/the-cost-of-rebar-and-the-c...
The low-end of plain steel rebar is $0.40.
I think people are often surprised how little materials cost affects the total cost of a job.
I'm having this argument at work, where I want some more expensive cabling installed in a bunch of offices across Scotland so it doesn't need to be done again in another ten year's time, but "that stuff is so expensive, do we really need it?" is what I'm running up against.
So as it turns out today I'm giving them a breakdown of the cost of the job. Guess what the expensive bits are?
Did you guess "wages for two guys, hotel rooms for two guys, 800 miles of diesel, and a couple of ferry tickets?"
Well, you're way ahead of today's crowd then.
1. (Design) Building floorplate and architectural complexity (i.e., divergence from 'big box')
2. (Construction) Schedule adherence. Almost any one-off expense to stick to the schedule is worth it, but to your point, these are often challenged or delayed. Building and testing equipment on skids off-site is almost always worth it.
3. (Design/Commissioning) Schedule adherence. For commissioning this is typically driven by design choices (did you pick a high-TRL process, or if not, do all the work required to mature it in parallel to construction?) and by building the right commissioning team (knows their job, knows the plant).
If more expensive plant & equipment gets you ahead on any of these 3, 99% of the time that is an overall optimisation.
The net result, we topped out and roofed the big house, then built the small house in its entirety while the owners of the big house chose their windows. Add that in favour of waterfall design...
I've never worked in this field as the GP, but I have family that do and I've heard plenty of stories and made my own observations, but definitely take my two cents with plenty of salt. Maybe GP will reply also.
This is what's interesting with AI pricing at the moment - it has gone from "a fraction of the equivalent labour cost" and so people have tried to cut staff, and is moving to "on par with labour cost" and all the calculations change.
Our house flooded about half a foot a year or two ago. I had to replace all the baseboards. The damage was assessed at $40k. I tried to contact contractors to do the work, but the job was so insignificant compared to other jobs in the area, and we were in the middle of getting our house raised, that it was taking forever.
Including tools I did not have prior, material costs ran about $5k - $7k. I did the work around my job and other obligations, so about one day a week for a couple of months. If I were to honestly guess, it probably took me about two weeks. And that's measuring, cutting, installing, caulking, and painting. And there were some inefficiencies in my process.
Because people don't understand how much compliance and box checking and check the guy who checked the last guy's work there is in a "you need government permission for this and not the easy permission they give a homeowner deck project" sized construction project.
It's because they frankly never did it. Nobody that had to contract something around the house is surprised by cost like that, it often costs more than price of renting equipment + you doing it yourself 3 times slower than an expert would did it, even if you're paid well.
There is reason there is so many DIY channels, labour costs are high and install costs of some stuff can be ridiculous (like 2 hour job to install AC costing more than cheap AC unit).
That's also partly the reason the more expensive materials are used - if they offer savings in labour (say way faster to put in), they might be worth it vs paying someone for more hours
We usually have a few freezes in the winter and some homes' pipes freeze. I was surprised, in speaking to a plumber, to find that pipe clamp installation had come to dominate the repair market (as opposed to repairing/replacing the leaky pipe).
In his first year this plumber had arrived at the plumbing supply house to find all pipe clamp orders backlogged two weeks! He thus determined to, during the warmer months, stockpile a cache of pipe clamps for the coming winter.
Furthermore, as SofTalker states, the fitting is usually left in-place instead of being replaced! Yet one more reason to have a prospective home inspected by someone who is very knowledgeable.
It was 300 quid.
I could not buy the materials for 300 quid.
Two guys showed up with eight slabs, half a tonne of Type 2 and half a tonne of sand, and then the next day the landscaper showed up and did about six hours of work to dig it all out, fill it all in, and put the slabs down.
It's absolutely perfect, exactly how I wanted it, and it would have taken me a couple of days and cost far more - and I'm quite good at that kind of stuff, it's just not what I do all day every day so the landscaper will be far better at it.
As far as I can tell, only one pier was built (using stainless steel rebar) and the presentation is comparing it to a hypothetical alternative as a theoretical exercise: "What if the Progreso Pier was built using carbon steel rebar?"
Progreso - great pier and a great kiteboarding spot.
But it turns out that's pretty inconvenient; we really like doing dozens of feet of span for highway overpasses, building floors, and everything else. So we put rebar in all the concrete and just acknowledge that that means it has an absolute maximum lifespan of a century or two, and will certainly not last for millennia the way pure concrete in pure compression can.
Looking it up on archive.org shows it was generated this year.
Until an earthquake occurs, and then all of those mostly-down forces turn into side-to-side forces.
You have a few mistakes here. I’m not trying to demean you, but I’m going to number them just for clarity, as it can get confusing when there are many misunderstandings.
1. You are intending to ask about tension (which the rebar helps with), not traction (the force your tires exert against a road).
2. Tension is not only experienced at the bottom of beams, the location with the most tension will depend on the geometry. For a vertical beam, I think tension will probably be pretty even through the whole beam in most “normal” designs and loading configurations. But it will really depend on the geometry and on the loads being applied.
3. I think when you say concrete beams you’re meaning columns (apologies if I’m wrong about this). Concrete columns are remarkably good at holding up without rebar, because they experience almost exclusively compression! And indeed, ancient Roman designs did not use rebar at all :). It’s certainly possible.
I don’t know if it is the case here, but it is a common mistake for some non-native English speakers. In some languages traction is a false friend.
Tension, as you say, is indeed the term used in physics and engineering for the force on an object pulling it from either end.
No, steel is better in both ways, ten times over. It's just more expensive, concrete is a "filler" to cheap out construction.
If you think about it, all engineering is about cheaping out things. It's pretty easy to build awesome projects having unlimited budget.
Basically the rebar works itself loose over time and creates micro-fractures in the concrete that then get moisture in them and can cause expansion damage— all without the rebar itself ever rusting or "failing".
Maybe this is the clue as to why our concrete crumbles after 100 years: it's not economically efficient to make it last longer?
Tastes change and so do other requirements.
but, if we actually built for longevity in use, we could build a very durable shell of a house and then use more perishable but easier to modify methods for inside. Build a nice durable brick and concrete shell then use wood and plasterboard for room walls and floors
Housing tastes don't really change that much. Yes over the years we've had to fit things like double glazing and better insulation but that's a whole lot cheaper (and better for the environment) than building a whole new building.
- older houses tend to be a lot more inefficient in their use of square footage
- the rooms inside tend to be a lot less open, and one man's "fun/quirky layout" is another man's "why do I have to go down a step then immediately go up a step to cross a hallway"
- and, I begrudgingly admit (as I don't like how they wreck house aesthetics) people really like big, attached garages
My overall suspicion is that when a lot of people say they like old houses, what they really mean is that they like buildings that look beautiful on the outside and, to a lesser extent, have a sense of being rooted in some kind of context.
Why do most people prefer older houses?
Character and history - they tend to be more individual and different, and have more character than the cookie cutter modern mass builds.
Solidity - they tend to be more stone and brick, instead of the timber framed buildings that are more common in new builds.
In fact in most of the western US that’s the norm…
> then use wood and plasterboard for room walls and floor
One of the things I LIKE about older houses is that the interior walls are more solid than plasterboard. There is zero plasterboard in my house and brick gives far better noise insulation than anything timber framed.
It was also common to build lathe and plaster covered interior partitions in the past. Way before plasterboard.
A modern one off house may well have concrete block downstairs walls to hold the floor up. Albeit, they may get covered with plasterboard 'dabbed on' anyway, to reduce drying time