this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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Ok, you must be trolling because concrete and brick have TERRIBLE thermal resistance. The same acoustic materials used in a wood wall give it like 20x the insulation.
And if you are not trolling, you should learn more about a subject before speaking on it next time. The claims you are making aren't true
That is the most stupid thought I heard on Internet for the whole week.
They're not wrong though. You might be thinking thermal resistance as in "can hold a blowtorch to it" in which case sure, bricks might win, but that's not the context here.
R-value measures how quickly heat transfers from one side of an object to the other, a higher number means it insulates better, or resists thermal transfer.
A 4" brick has an R value under one. It's like 0.8 or so. 1" thick plywood is already better at 1.25 or so. I think the OSB used as sheathing on the outside of wood frame houses is higher still but could be wrong there. Bricks objectively have worse numbers here
Yeah, for good termal resistance with brick you need double walls with a gap in the middle (with air is good, with thermal insulating foam is better).
That said, I (in Europe) have never seen double walls used for internal walls.
PS: Actually I just remembered that in some places the kind of brick used is not solid but actually hollow - for example and one of the differences from this to the solid kind is exactly that these have better acoustic and thermal insulation.
No bricks and concrete have high thermal mass, but they have fairly high lamda values making them very poor insulators
Bricks: 0.84
Concrete (dense): 1.4
Hardwood timber: ~0.15
Woodfibre board: 0.11
Plasterboard: 0.16
source
Wood and plasterboard is still a poor insulator compared to actual insulation materials (they're around 0.035-0.038, with exception of PIR), but still much better than both brick and solid concrete.
Would you mind checking the R value of brick for me? And while you're at it, check what an insulated wood wall's is?
Brick and concrete have high thermal MASS, not resistance.
Again, please learn more about a subject before you speak so confidently on it. You could have looked it up real quick before posting
Bricks do have terrible thermal insulation. You are probably confusing thermal mass for thermal insulation.
I think that depends on whether it's solid brick or this kind of brick.
Were I live (Portugal) houses tend to be made from the latter kind of brick.
That said, even the latter kind of brick doesn't provide as good insulation as double walls, either air gapped or (even better) with insulating foam in between, and I've only ever seen that used for external walls, mainly in colder (further to the North) countries in Europe.
What materials are preferred heavily depends on the local climate, too! Those bricks probably work great for the sweet spot Portugal is in for weather. They'd be very bad up here in the Midwest US, thermal mass works against you when it's below freezing out.
I've done a lot of what probably sounds like brick slander here but I'm not a hater, my dream home would have a brick exterior with a wood frame interior. I've just worked in a construction-adjacent industry for a long time and wanted to dispel the misinformation this guy is peddling