Installed by Side-Pro Exteriors across Seattle, Bellevue and Tacoma
Stone wool, not fiber cement. It cuts like timber, weighs a fraction of a cement panel, and it will not take water into the board.
Rockpanel is a ROCKWOOL Group product: compressed basalt-based stone wool with a low binder content, pressed into 8 and 9 mm boards in sheets up to 3050 mm long. It is not fiber cement and it does not behave like it. The boards are light enough to handle on a scaffold without a second pair of hands, they cut with ordinary woodworking tools, and they take a fixing without the care a dense cement panel demands at the edge.
The property that earns it a place on a Puget Sound wall is moisture insensitivity. The board does not swell, rot, or draw water into its body, which is a different proposition from a material that merely resists it at the surface. Rockpanel’s published durability claims are color and UV resistance, insensitivity to moisture, dirt resistance and low maintenance — note that the list stops there, and does not extend to moss, algae or mold.
Boards arrive pre-finished in a wide color range along with wood-look and metallic finishes, and the format suits a designed facade with expressed joints and a considered fixing pattern rather than a conventional lap re-side. On the right Seattle or Bellevue building it does something fiber cement cannot — large flat panels with very little weight penalty on the frame behind them.
We install rainscreen assemblies of this kind on residential and commercial buildings across Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and the wider Puget Sound region.
EQUITONE panels · Swisspearl fiber cement · Nichiha fiber cement · All siding services
Two things to settle before this board is specified rather than after. Rockpanel’s fire classification is A2-s1,d0 under EN 13501-1, which is a European standard. It is not an ASTM E84 Class A rating, and Rockpanel publishes no ASTM E84, ASTM E136 or NFPA 285 data — so where a project needs a US fire rating on the cladding, that has to be established with the manufacturer up front. Rockpanel also publishes no warranty document in English, and its published dealer network is European. None of that makes it the wrong board; it makes it a board to scope properly. Talk to us early and we will confirm availability, lead time and code approval for your specific project rather than assume them.