In2food, Benoni

In2food's facility in Benoni is a steel portal-framed shed. The work in this album is the room-building inside it: offices, change rooms and enclosed spaces put up within the existing frame while the plant around them stayed a plant. The photographs are dated from late September to mid-December 2023, and they follow one wall from a stack of blocks on the floor to a painted room with a suspended ceiling and a tiled floor.

Technopol supplied LiteCore. The external block is a 150 mm composite - 45 mm foamed cement, a 60 mm CavityLite EPS core, 45 mm foamed cement - and the internal block is 100 mm solid foamed cement, both 1200 x 340 mm on the face, both with a tongue-and-groove bed profile. You can read the whole section in the second photograph: two grey skins and a white core, on a block sitting on the course below it. They are laid in stretcher bond in LiteCore Bond thin-bed adhesive and rendered both sides with LiteCore Plast on fibreglass mesh.

What the product had to do here is what the Agrement certificate covers and nothing more. LiteCore is non-load-bearing infill inside an engineer-designed steel (SANS 517) or reinforced-concrete frame, with cast in-situ ring beams; the frame carries the building and the block carries itself. The certified occupancy classes include D2 and D3 (low- to moderate-risk industrial) and G1 (offices), which is what this fit-out is. The photographs show the walls stopping short of the shed roof, the columns left clear, and the ring-beam steel run along the top of the wall - the wall is inside the frame, not part of it.

What it did: 1200 x 340 mm blocks go up by hand, one man to a block at 18 kg, so a wall closes fast and the finished wall is light - about 44 kg/m2 for the bare 150 mm block wall before render, against a conventional masonry wall of the same job. Then it takes an ordinary trade: render, skim, paint, skirting, ceiling grid. The last photographs are not showing anything clever - they are showing a normal painted office, which is the point. Nothing about the finished room tells you it is a lightweight EPS-cored wall, except that the specifier's XA submission can carry the certified whole-wall R-value of 2.30 m2K/W instead of a masonry deemed-to-satisfy route.

Two things a specifier should carry away from this job rather than from the brochure. The wall panel size is capped at 3500 mm by the certificate unless a competent person takes design responsibility for the panel - it is a certificate limit, not a wind calculation, and it cannot be interpolated. And the 120-minute figure that gets quoted for the external wall is a SANS 10400-T deemed-to-satisfy classification, not a furnace test on this build-up; the only furnace-tested rating in the family is FR60, and that on the NuClad LiteCore light-steel assembly. If the authority wants tested minutes above 60, this is not the wall.