Product Lifetime

Cembrit's facade and build & indoor products have an expected lifetime of 40-60 years and our Roofing products (corrugated sheets and slates) have an expected lifetime of 25-30 years when installed and used correctly. The guaranteed lifetime of these products is 30 years.

The expected lifetime refers to the product's period of use in service before a replacement is needed and the guaranteed lifetime refers to a lifetime where Cembrit will be liable for defects from production. The expected lifetime of Cembrit's facade products contribute to reducing the life cycle costs of the building.

Durability

The durability on our products is documented according to our Product Lifetime. Cembrit continuously monitors products after production and installed in buildings. We examine the products and the time elapsed since their production. We call this project our  'durability study'.

These real-life durability studies act as a continual assessment of our products and give us the chance to monitor and assess the performance of our products over time, and if necessary to take actions in production to improve their performance, or make adjustments to the installation-guidelines. Thereby ensuring our products and information are always the best they can be.

Robustness

Cembrit's products are made of fibre cement and are an exceptionally strong and weather resistant building material. Our products have a remarkable resilience to almost all external conditions and impacts. Cembrit produce long-lasting products with little service needs which maximizes the use of resources.

Cembrit's products can be mechanically fixed and therefore can easily be removed and separated from other materials without causing any damage to other parts of the construction. In case of replacement, Cembrit can provide identical facade products, which can be bespoke for each individual building and project, thus avoiding the need to replace the entire facade.

Cembrit provides a flexibility to the appearance of the building, by making is easy to replace the facade products with other colours or surface textures.

Cembrit Reference Service Life

In Cembrit we want to secure our product lifetime. We do this through our Proved lifetime project. Here we visually investigate how our products have performed since the production of the first products without asbestos – this is what we call our real life durability study.

When we develop matrix and paint recipes in Cembrit, many hours of research and tests are conducted in our laboratory. We have several requirements, which must be fulfilled before the release of a recipe. In the laboratory, we accelerate the aging and weathering of our products to ensure their durability. To support this we use the information gained from the real life durability study of our products. It gives the chance to assess the performance of our products over time in "real-world" conditions and to make adjustments in production, if necessary, based on these findings to ensure our products perform at their optimum throughout their life-time.

The real life durability study is a part of documenting our Reference Service Lifetime (RSL). In Cembrit, we are documenting reference for our products for the 'in-use' condition. We do this by declaring our products properties. Our installation manuals outline the correct handling, use and installation of our products along with important information on how to maintain and replace our products. For some of our products we have a leaching test, for others we have UV test, documenting how our products react when exposed to wind, rain, sun etc.