Concrete floor panels: fifty-foot spans and forty percent less concrete

The part of the system commercial teams usually do not know exists.

Most people find us looking for walls. The floor panel is often the piece that changes a commercial project’s numbers more than the walls do, and almost nobody arrives knowing about it.

What it is

A 7.5 inch thick stay-in-place form for a reinforced concrete floor, 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, with two 8 inch wide channels running its length to carry rebar in the reinforced beams. It is R-58 insulation and formwork and part of the finished structure, all at once.

The numbers

It spans up to 50 feet clear with minimum shoring. It cuts concrete volume by roughly 40% — the average section works out around 58 psf. It gives a high-STC fire stop between floors. It reduces labour time on the floor by more than 60%. And it carries five studs, so ducts hang and sheathing attaches directly without a separate framing layer.

Where that matters

On multi-family and hospitality projects, floors are where a lot of the schedule and a lot of the concrete budget live. Removing 40% of the concrete removes trucks, pumping, curing time and weight — which in turn affects the structure below and sometimes the foundation. Removing formwork stripping removes a labour operation entirely, since the form stays put and becomes the insulation.

What your engineer will want

The design manual and stamped, sealed load tables by BEI Engineering for fPanel application with reinforced concrete up to 40 ft spans, plus the 3D fPanel rendering showing the rear and electrical chase. Both are on the resources page. Bring us in before the structural scheme is fixed: the floor system changes column spacing and beam sizing, and retrofitting it into a design drawn for hollow-core or cast-in-place gives up most of the benefit.

Residential use

It is not only a commercial product. On a house with a slab over unconditioned space, a garage below living space, or a cold-climate walkout, the same panel gives you a fully insulated floor with no thermal bridge and no separate insulation trade.