Is Prefabricated Panel for House Wall Good or Not?

There are many hidden dangers in using prefabricated panels for house walls, and it is not recommended. The specific reasons are as follows:

Poor integrity and almost zero earthquake resistance: When constructing with prefabricated panels, it is like building a house with building blocks, stacking them one by one without integrating them with the walls as a whole. There is only simple overlapping between the panels and the walls, with rarely any firm steel bar connections. When subjected to external forces such as earthquakes or shaking, once the horizontal force arrives, the floor slabs and walls separate instantly and collapse suddenly without any crack warnings or deformation buffers. The entire panel drops straight down, leaving little chance for escape. In many past earthquakes, prefabricated panel houses suffered severe collapses and high casualty rates, fully demonstrating their weak earthquake resistance.

Extremely fragile connection points: The prefabricated panels are simply overlapped with the walls, and the gaps between the panels are simply filled without any ring beams or structural columns, resulting in the entire house lacking a rigid framework. Once there is slight settlement of the foundation or cracking of the walls, the panels will become misaligned and loose. Over time, exposed to wind, sun, heat expansion, and cold contraction, the connection points gradually weather, and the steel bars rust, reducing the strength more and more. Some old houses that have been lived in for two or three decades have floor slabs that are on the verge of collapse. Adding a little weight or knocking down a wall may trigger a chain collapse.

The materials themselves are often shoddy, with high brittleness and easy breakage: Regular prefabricated panels have thin steel bars, but many small workshops use thin steel wires instead of steel bars, and the concrete grades do not meet the standards with insufficient thickness. They look like cement panels but actually crack with a single hit. Prefabricated panels have the characteristic of brittle failure, unlike cast-in-place floor slabs which have toughness and can hold up for a while even when cracked. Once the load exceeds the capacity, they break instantly without any warning. Stacking heavy objects, knocking on the ground during renovation, or even aging over time may cause sudden collapses.

Prone to water leakage and cracking: There is a relatively high possibility of water leakage due to cracks between the prefabricated panels. In the past, when building bungalows with prefabricated panels on the roofs, after long-term exposure to wind and rain, the gaps between the panels allowed water to seep in, affecting the living experience in the rooms. Moreover, in the past, when building houses in rural areas, little attention was paid to the use of waterproof materials, leading to water leakage situations.