Month: May 2015


Should I replace my boiler?

18 05/15
Should I replace my boiler at the same time as insulating my external walls?

Should I replace my boiler at the same time as insulating my external walls?

Exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion is a big addi­tion to the fab­ric of your home, so it is worth think­ing – what else should I be doing at the same time to make sure I am get­ting value for money on my instal­la­tion? One pos­si­ble answer might well be to con­sider installing a new boiler!

Flues

As you may be aware, a typ­i­cal boiler will have a lit­tle round vent com­ing out of your wall to allow the waste gasses to escape the room. The flue usu­ally sticks out from the wall, and you will often see on a chilly day the steam ris­ing from the side of the house.

In most cases exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion pro­trudes from the exist­ing wall by 100mm (although this might vary between sup­pli­ers). When you install exter­nal insu­la­tion, as you might expect, you can’t just bury the flue in the insu­la­tion, it needs to be extended out with a flue exten­sion kit that exactly matches the cur­rent model of boiler. This typ­i­cally adds around £200 to the cost of the works.

If you need a new boiler at the same time – you can avoid that extra cost, because the new boiler can have a longer flue installed at the same time at no addi­tional cost. This won’t be the answer for every­one of course – some peo­ple will already have a rel­a­tively mod­ern boiler installed, in which case it will be far most cost effec­tive just to pay for the exten­sion of the flue.

Why 50mm of External Solid Wall Insulation is Just Not Enough?

06 05/15
Why 50mm of External Solid Wall Insulation is Just Not Enough

Why 50mm of External Solid Wall Insulation is Just Not Enough

As you can imag­ine, we get a huge amount of inter­est in solid wall insu­la­tion, espe­cially since the launch of the Gov­ern­ment GDHIF scheme which pro­vides gen­er­ous grants to help cover the cost of the works (up to 67% of the total cost!).

What peo­ple are often sur­prised to find out when they get in touch with us is that we rec­om­mend installing 100mm of insu­la­tion to the wall. Many peo­ple assume that 50mm or less will be more than suf­fi­cient to lower their energy bills.

Well in a way they are cor­rect – it will lower their bills, how­ever we are about to show you why 50mm is never enough!

Read about render problems and how to fix them by clicking on the image!

Why not just insulate with 50mm of insulation?

Using 50mm of EPS insu­la­tion does improve the U-Value a huge amount – as a reminder the U-value is sim­ply a mea­sure of heat loss through an object, the lower the value the bet­ter in terms of ther­mal effi­ciency.

Solid brick walls have a U-value of around 2.1-3W/m² and adding 50mm of expanded poly­styrene (EPS) will take the U-value down to 0.5W/m²k, which is a sub­stan­tial improve­ment, but 100mm takes it down to just 0.27W/m2k.

A new cav­ity wall built today must be built to a u-value of 0.3W/m2k which means if you ret­ro­spec­tively add just 50mm of EPS insu­la­tion it won’t be suf­fi­cient to adhere to build­ing reg­u­la­tions. If 25% of the exter­nal wall is being insu­lated you MUST adhere to build­ing reg­u­la­tions, there­fore you are legally obliged to go for this larger thick­ness. In addi­tion, if insu­la­tion is being installed under the GDHIF scheme, then it must adhere to build­ing regs, so if some­one has installed 50mm of insu­la­tion on your home it is worth get­ting in touch of them to make sure they come and do it cor­rectly!!