Wood as a building material

Why use wood as a building material?

Beyond its undeniable aesthetic appeal, wood as a building material offers a number of advantages. Let’s discover the exceptional properties of this noble, living material.

A material with exceptional properties

Wood is so popular as a building material primarily because of its aesthetic appeal, but also because of its exceptional properties, which make it a material of many uses:

• Wood is a light, flexible and particularly resistant material that adapts to all types of architecture and design, even the heaviest.
• Wood is an excellent sound and heat insulator, providing homes with a healthy, temperate environment.

An environmentally-friendly building material

Thanks to its insulating properties, wood is a great energy saver, retaining heat in winter and preventing heat from penetrating the structure in hot weather. By way of comparison, wood is 12 times more insulating than concrete and reduces heating costs by 20% in the average home. Wood also helps to combat the greenhouse effect by acting as a C02 trap, and requires less energy to build than other construction materials such as breeze blocks or aluminium.
Constructing a home or building from wood is a truly ecological and environmentally responsible solution.

Why protect a wooden building?

Despite all its qualities, wood is a material that remains particularly sensitive to external attack:

• climatic hazards (rain, sun, wind)
• biological agents (fungi, etc.)
• wood-eating insects and insects with wood-eating larvae

If wood is not protected, it will wither over time, causing greying and a change in the appearance of exterior facades, and it will be subject to attack by wood pests.
It is therefore essential to protect wood with preventive treatments, but also to maintain it year after year with curative treatments and protective products.

The XILIX range for wood protection

To protect and maintain wood used as a building material, Alkalis has developed its XILIX and XILIX EXPERT product ranges. These ranges include a wide range of solutions specially designed to protect existing wood from various types of damage:

• Wood insecticide treatment
• Wood fungicide treatment
• Anti-uv wood protection
• Anti-dampness wood protection
• Decoration and maintenance products

All these solutions enhance the value of wood and make it highly durable over the long term