 One day on a home that they can live and have a comfortable place they can call home. The government came up with the big four agenda and affordable housing was one of them. And as we try to find ways to achieve this, technology and new innovations have done so well in providing solutions to the same plan. Here is the feature on the EPS materials. Affordable housing in Kenya is on the height to implement the big four agenda as enshrined in jubilee parties work plan. Affordable housing one of the key agendas has been on the receiving is on the height to implement the big four agenda as enshrined in jubilee parties work plan. Affordable housing one of the key agendas has been on the receiving end as many Kenyans claim not to understand how it will benefit them. Working with the private sector we will deliver half a million decent and affordable homes to working Kenyans in the next five years. We will make owning a home an opportunity that every Kenyan of modest income can afford. Home ownership is a path to the middle class. It will become, it will now become an accessible part of the Kenyan dream. Importantly the delivery of the new homes will also create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The move awakens the private sectors in the housing industry to try as much as possible to incorporate technology towards achieving decent housing in Kenya. We will implement the big four agenda as enshrined in jubilee parties work plan. Thank you. Mambu kama loks na mambu mengine kama hai, itengezwe hapa, sininam na hiu. Wana inchiwe tu piwa wa pati kazi hiu, sininam na hiu. I take a visit to a factory site in Syukimawu, where I meet Hanfrio go to the head of the factory at Koto housing, who is championing the use of EPS. Koto housing came into being in Kenya five years ago. The whole concept was that there is an easier way of building as opposed to the traditional way of building. The whole concept was to get modular housing that you can build fast and in large volumes. So the local partners who are in Kenya went and partnered with the parent company in Malaysia where is the home of Koto. And Koto is not a Kenyan name. It comes from Malaysia and we work as a franchise of Koto Malaysia. Malaysia is a key company. They came up with the formulation, they came up with the products and they came up with all the necessary components required. So once the idea had been formed, they went ahead and went to Malaysia and spoke to the person who had the franchise for this product. Once they had conceptualized the idea and they made the order for the machines, I joined them about four or five months later to come and do the implementation of their dream. This new technology comes with a bunch of advantages as Koto says it suits well with all regions even those vastly affected with floods. If you look at EPS as being the building, then there is a misconception. EPS is just a formwork to hold the concrete. Any EPS building, any panel building is actually a concrete structure. Based on what, the strength is derived from the concrete which has been tested. For many years it is something which is well known, the properties are known, everything about concrete, people know. So we are not changing that. The only way is the way we are presenting the concrete and the way we are casting the concrete. So what we make is permanent formwork. On the permanent formwork you are able to pour the concrete and hold the columns and beams. Our structures are column and beam structures. We have ring beam at the bottom with columns coming to the top ring beam. On top of the ring beam you may have another floor which is a slab or you may put a conventional roof. So the strength of the panel has nothing to do but the strength of the building. The strength of the building is determined by the concrete that you pour and the reinforcements. Expanded polystream EPS is a light with cellular plastic material consisting of small holospherical balls. It is this closed cellular construction that gives EPS its remarkable characteristics. EPS is produced in a wide range of densities providing a varying range of physical properties. In fact this one is better than stone because stone has a tendency to suck the water from the ground. The EPS does not suck water from the ground. The only thing that might be sucking water is a plaster which is attached to the EPS. But by and large if you use a raft foundation on that the area of contact, the EPS vis-a-vis a standard slab, the area of contact is much reduced. We'll only have the beams which will be able to draw the water from the ground source. And therefore your house will be much drier. We're not saying it's going to be 100% dry but you need to make special considerations especially if it is a swampy place so that you can mitigate the dampness that is coming from the ground. Afri takes me through the process involved to get this precious commodity in. I'd like to begin with the process of making beads and the EPS. Behind me is the first machine in our process. This is what we call the pre-expander. On this machine we convert the raw material which comes in this size which is like a fine salt. That's the raw material. We come from this material. It's really small. Yeah, very small. Actually it's called a salt because of the size and the grain, the texture. It is very tiny. And what normally happens in this machine is that you introduce heat and this is blown 40 times to the size of this other material here. This one here. This is now the expanded beads. Between the first one and this one the expansion reaches 40 times. So what it means is that the bag that you see behind you there is expanded into 40 times. It fills two sides. Yes. On this machine we have steam coming in through these pipes here. This one is on that one. Those ones bring the steam into the barrel. That's the expansion barrel at the back. It is weighed at the top, 17 kilos per cycle and then it comes into the expanding chamber. From there the steam mixes with the beads, the small size beads. After mixing with the beads it will expand. That expansion is about 40 times and after it's expanded then it's taken out in cycles in batches. A batch taking how long maybe about two or three minutes for each cycle. The batch has gone through the machine. It is now taken to the silo. The silo is made of a porous net. The reason being that the excess blowing agent which is painted which is embedded in the raw material is allowed to escape. If we were to use it direct then it would mean that whatever we make will still be expanded so it will end up being distorted. So that's why the cycle time is at. Today you give it 24 hours. After 24 hours is when you take it to the next process. And during the 24 hours the excess painting escapes naturally. That is why the silos are left open and whatever is escaping escapes naturally. For our parhouse which has got our boiler it has a compressor it has the cooling water which are the three components which are used in the next machines. The boiler that we have apart from the boiler we have what we call the accumulator. It's like a drum for the steam so once you come from the boiler you take it into the accumulator. It's a reservoir for steam so that when you're using the steam the fluctuation is reduced is reduced by virtue of having that storage. So it allows the boiler to run for long periods and then it stores the steam. When the steam has reached enough then you can now start using the machine. It's a boiler which is a four ton boiler with a diesel banner. This is a diesel banner which is sparring the boiler. You feed in your diesel from the tanks through the pipes that you can see on this end that is your infield to the banner. And then the water is coming from the back of the boiler. It comes into the boiler. It is heated then it leaves through those two pipes. The pipe that you see at the top that one at the top goes straight to the receiver and from there now you can distribute. That is a boiler that takes care of the steam side of things. On the other side we have the compressors. The blue ones, these are two compressors 37 kilos each. We have divided them into two for the simple reason that we can face. If we are running all machines we run both. If we are running part of the plant we can run one compressor. And same as the steam the compressor has an accumulator at the top which stores the air. It's a reservoir for air. So whenever you switch on the compressor the compressor fills the reservoir and then you take your air from the reservoir into the machines the machines which are now producing the pannas. You see the two blue pipes at the top those ones are for cooling water because once we have cast the pannas you need to cool the mold so that you can remove whatever you formed inside the mold which I'm going to show in a minute. Once you have your compressor you have your steam and you have your cooling water. All three elements come into this machine. We have now the beads from the pre-expander. Now we are going into the block molding machine. This is a block molder. This produces the individual units of the panel. So each panel is produced in the mold. You see this one is here. This one will generate the hole inside the mold. So this one once you are running the machine it will close and this will be filled with beads. It will introduce steam through those pipes at the bottom. That steam is going to make the beads fuse. Once the heat fuses the beads then you need to remove the product from the mold. So you open the machine and through this eject us in here which will push the product out. It will fall to the ground and put a canvas here to give it a soft landing. It will fall. Each cycle takes about 130 seconds and you get four pieces. This mold has got 130 seconds. That is what it is. And for each machine there are different sizes of molds and different lengths. This is the product that you would get. It comes out of the machine that way. This product represents the cause that we have seen and then this would fall to the ground once the mold reaches the end. The one that you are seeing here is a 200mm panel. From here to here is 200mm. From that end to this end is 1.2 meters. That's a block now. This is now the individual block which we are going to compile two or three of them to make a panel. There are some panels we can actually coat this especially over the lento. We can put a single one between the lento and the wall plate to be the space of 300mm. This module here is 300mm. That is 1.2 and this is 200mm. Yes. We have four varieties. There is one with 150mm. There is one with 1.8mm. So we have 200mm by 1.2mm and we have 150mm by 1.2mm. We can sense the two machines that you see here. These two are 1.2 machines. The length, this one here. The target is something concrete especially on external walls. For internal walls you have an option. You can leave some of them open because there is no danger of there is no security risk per se. What we are doing here we are burning the sun. We are burning the sun because of the new polygonic matter and we filter the sun to the size that we require. It is a particular size that we need for us to have a uniform coating which is not going to be affected by any decay because our coatings are not mixed with water. We mix it to the polygons later on which would react to any damage that is why we have to try and that is the sun. We put in sun for manen that comes to achieve to the people. The sun has been filtered and dried and even for the ratios that we make, we need to use dry sun, not the one in the world. And then from here now we add the chemicals and the cement to make a plaster that one which is going to coat the pannas we are going to coat them and put a reinforcement so that we have a 45 plaster. Now this is the next process in our process which is the coating process. Here is where we coat the pannas is that we make one pannas. After we joint them into several pieces we bring them together in front of me is the reinforcement. This is a 5-ish we have different sizes we have different sizes what manen happens you plaster coat this machine it goes to the head and it is plastered we give it a finish but you get so once we have done that we put it on the frame and then we give it 36,000 or so like this one we are doing is the second coating what you see here is the coating process that is what makes it continues to make it which has got a dry part and a wet part the two of them in the tube and it is quite easy because this thing one of this is like 1.6km it is about 30 kilos so the challenges and the volume as opposed to the weight with stone is the other way round stone is small but very dense so this normally marks this process after curing the government has taken precedence in using this technology and one of the notable project is in Kajadu County where the EPS Matijus are used to build police housing project meet Mark Mwisha the marketing director at Kota Housing he proudly talks of his 3 bedroomed house built using the EPS Matijus well since you finished the factory now here is where you come when you want to build a house where the ones who actually do sell you the technology we explain to you about the technology what is the advantage of this how long will it take you to build see in construction it has only taken a longer period of building when you are building using the brick and mortar whereas with this house that you are looking at here which we built in the Kota panels you are looking at about 4 to 5 weeks from foundation to completion and you are moving to your house and it is a very strong house because as you see in the panels within those cavities or the co-holes we reinforce with steel bars and concrete so you are creating a series of columns throughout your structure so any building that has a series of columns within the world is a very strong building as I informed you earlier this house actually took us 4 weeks 4 weeks so you look at about 30 days pushing at most give it about 6 weeks because it also depends on the type of finishes you want you look like a person who likes high end finishes so I might push an extra week so it took us about 4 weeks to finish this particular house now why I would opt you to actually take into this technology one, if you are going to get a house within a period of 4 weeks and it is a permanent structure after being built you cannot even tell the difference between the convention on this one it is a bonus for you 2, you have to understand the materials are not very heavy they are actually light so I do have to consider doing a very hard foundation I do have to excavate all the way to down because basically mostly you find most money is lost when you are doing the foundation because if the rock is about 3 meters deep if you are going to fill that with hardcore that could be the cost of another house so you will do maybe what we call a floating foundation labor actually we never had more than 9 people and we still finished in a breaking period of 4 weeks so there are many advantages if you look at this house we are in right now this is like a 3 bedroom and as you can feel the temperature is cool now it means like this to do it because the EPS does not transfer code from the outside into the house and then you also find that since you have the columns in cases where they are tremors now this kind of technology actually does prevent the house from actually collapsing if in a place where there are earthquakes and stuff like that which in Kenya we are lucky we don't have so apart from the insulation qualities this material does not absorb water which means you can even finish with a wallpaper and you won't see like the kawaii when you do with a brick and mortar what will happen water is absorbed from the outside then it starts boiling over from the inside which makes the wallpaper now come out so basically with this you never have those kind of effects absolutely let me tell you what makes the house now be unstable one you are trying to build in a fast pace trying to compete with this technology which is in stone and mortar which you can't you have to give time for your walls to settle and with the EPS as I told it is light so basically even though I do my slab the chances of my wall being very heavy is not there it is actually very light then another thing you also have to look at with the brick and mortar compared to this technology is the different ways which we can build we have in this kind of different ways you can build I could decide if I am doing a story building I do the conversion of columns and beams that's a superstructure then as you've seen my panels you've seen how light you can carry one person I use that as infields and I use the slabs which means my building will be lighter so the chances of my house collapsing my friend dude not in this lifetime now with this technology as I've been experimented this technology can actually withstand winds of about 360 km per hour that's a hurricane as it do definitely where the technology began was in Malaysia you know the change the weather just changed just like that it could be something like this then over time it's a very huge storm with major winds and if you look at this technology back in Malaysia it started back in 1974 and that was a still standing my house here is 7 years old now 6 years old since we built it and look at it, it's still standing there's been rain, there's been what so it has gone through all elements and it still stands strong basically with my technology you only have one disadvantage just one? just one, I'll be honest basically if you have something good you have something good so I have to tell you for sure the only disadvantage in my technology is that once I've finished building the house according to your plan in 10 years time maybe I want to add an extra room here you have to tell us in advance we can make the provisions because since I have a series of columns I cannot cut the columns and then put a door because basically what happens I'm messing with the structural integrity of the building so basically my major flaw is that once the house is completely locked it is locked let's not talk about expanding upwards or sideways Karibu san, when am I building your house? let me think about from brick and mortar to EPS material you can get your house in for weeks like three bedroom house three weeks you can imagine things we were doing in months and probably in years now you can do it in weeks technology has really changed and as we speak about affordable housing this is one thing that needs to be put in consideration I hope you have learned something and you're going to this new technology because times are changing and we also need to change with time my name is Dereva Hilary very well there you have it times are changing and so we need to change with time Khemani Karangia from Kana Maim Tuapa thank you so much for keeping us company and others who watched this feature and this program many things for keeping us company I will now be leaving you in the safe hands of Kendra Elbis and DJTS Kaonwaimashariki I'll be seeing you again next week on Monday until then have yourself a very good night and a productive week ahead thank you my name is Dereva Hilary