Cellular concrete company sets up in Manatee. It’s a lightweight building material
Several years ago, Florida Power and Light reinforced the Lake Parrish dam, built in the 1970s to create Lake Parrish. The huge lake provides cooling for the Parrish power plant.
Paul Falco, sole proprietor of Cellular Grout Production Services and CEO of Cellular Concrete Technologies, was part of that project, supervising the injection of a lightweight form of concrete along the edge of the dam. The cellular concrete displaced the water, providing a bulwark against lake water as it hardened.
Falco, 62, had spent most of his career in the building industry in California and Connecticut, until the Lake Parrish project brought him to Manatee County.
“This is beautiful,” Falco said, when he saw the green landscape, and the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Besides, there was more elbow room than he was accustomed to in California.
He and his wife decided to stay in Manatee County and to locate his company to a location on Lena Road in East Manatee.
This week, Falco was preparing to ship a batch mixer for his lightweight concrete to Bangladesh to lay down road base.
How lightweight is cellular concrete? Falco hefts an 10-pound block of the stuff, like some kind of movie prop, and says if it were traditional concrete it would weigh more than 100 pounds.
Cellular concrete and lightweight cellular concrete are an engineered Portland cement slurry combined with precise amounts of density controlled foam. The Portland cement slurry and foam are mixed producing a lightweight mixture containing uniformly distributed air cells. In its rigid form it can be thought of as cement based grout having air as the aggregate, according to the company web site.
The air bubbles in the cellular concrete are smaller than a grain of sand. The product is strong, lightweight, sustainable, and resistant to heat or cold, Falco said.
“I am a builder. I want to make something that will last,” he says.
Falco believes cellular concrete could be part of the solution to providing more affordable housing, a chronic problem in the Bradenton area and across the United States.
“You could pour a house in a day, easy,” he said.
“There is still stuff out there to be invented. Inventions come from necessity,” he said. “This could help bring a sustainable housing product to the world. Otherwise, we are going to run out of materials and places to live. Let’s give ourselves a better place to live. I am talking about doing 200 or 300 houses at a time.”
For more information about cellular concrete, call 949-573-0509 or visit https://cellulargroutps.com/index.php/about/.
