Electrical in ICF Walls

This is the hot knife. basically, the blade out front heats up and melts the foam, cutting it.

For an electrical box, you set the depth of the wire blade to the depth for the electrical box. Remember, we still have drywall to add, so the depth is set in 1/2" to accommodate drywall.

Then we mark the location of the box on the ICF.

And start by inserting the hot knife in at the bottom. Notice the hot knife blade for electrical boxes is sized just right in width, so all you have to do is get the height of the box right.

Once the knife is all the way inserted, you can let the hot knife rest flatly on the foam, and just move upward or downward.

Here we move upward.

All the way to the top of our box outline.

When you reach the desired height of the electrical box, just pull the hot knife straight out.

And remove the foam cut out.

And insert the electrical box!

The electrical box is attached to the concrete poured in the center of the blocks with concrete anchor screws to keep in place. After wiring, around the box can be spray foamed as well to protect from heat loss.

So that was easy, but I know a lot of you smart folks are also asking how do you get the wire to the boxes? There's nothing that get's by you!

And insert and move along!

And just go with it!

Then you can pull the cut out out and run your wire.

We are demonstrating on a scrap piece ICF, so you may notice we ran into a black fastening strip.  What you do in practice is run the channel at the joint between two blocks, where there is no fastening strip.

So we will be running a channel all the way around, one block up, to run wire to each electrical box.

One thing we can't stand about our current house is not enough outlets, despite building to electrical code.  Its always a hunt to plug a laptop in!  So we will be putting extra boxes in just to make Mom's life as easy as possible.  We've definitely got our work cut out for us today!

Have you done ICFs?  What did you think of the electrical process?