Month: June 2015


Solid wall insulation – Window Sills

30 06/15
Solid wall insulation – Window Sills 2

Solid wall insulation – Window Sills

When solid wall insu­la­tion is installed on the exter­nal walls of a prop­erty it is nor­mally 10cm thick or more. What this means is that the sill of pre­vi­ously installed win­dows will stop well before the edge of the insu­la­tion. This doesn’t look great to be hon­est and could cause issues with water runoff, so the sills need to be extended out beyond the edge of the exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion to pro­vide an attrac­tive end fin­ish. Click on the image below to learn more about water ingress and damp.

In an ideal world, we rec­om­mend replac­ing the win­dows at the same time as get­ting the insu­la­tion works done. The rea­son for this is twofold; the first is that if you come to replace the win­dows in the future, the process of remov­ing and refit­ting them doesn’t com­pro­mise the integrity of the solid wall insu­la­tion. The sec­ond rea­son is that the sills can been ‘pre-extended’ when the win­dows are made, so if for exam­ple you have wooden sash win­dows being installed – the sills on the new win­dow already have taken into account the addi­tional 10cm of insu­la­tion, so when they are in and the insu­la­tion is installed they look great.

For many of us though, the cost involved with replac­ing win­dows and doing exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion at the same time is just too great. So when it comes to extend­ing win­dow sills what options do you have?

Good solid wall Insulation installer?

02 06/15
solid wall insulation installer 2

 

 

 

Good solid wall insulation installer

Good solid wall insulation installer

One of the most con­fus­ing aspects of receiv­ing mul­ti­ple quotes from installers is the price vari­a­tion. Why should installer A be ‘x’ amount cheaper than installer B?

Well there are the obvi­ous costs of mate­ri­als and where they are sourced. Installer A may get their mate­ri­als directly from the fac­tory, whereas installer B may have to go through a mid­dle­man. Obvi­ously if you can use installer A in this case it would be bet­ter since you get the mate­ri­als cheaper but this shouldn’t fac­tor into the qual­ity of the install.

At Silicone Render company, we source our solid wall insu­la­tion mate­ri­als directly from the sup­plier in uk and  Ger­many!

 

It is more impor­tant how­ever, to look beyond just the price the installer can source the solid wall mate­ri­als; you then need to con­sider the processes and tech­niques they use when they install the sys­tem on your home!

Even if the high­est qual­ity mate­ri­als are used when your exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tem is installed, the over­all per­for­mance can be hin­dered if the insu­la­tion isn’t installed cor­rectly. Insu­la­tion applied with­out fol­low­ing the insu­la­tion guide can result in the sys­tem fail­ing; this might lead to dam­age on the façade and other areas.

So things to con­sider when you do your home­work on installers include whether they bury gas pipes and leave the insu­la­tion open? Are snag­ging aspects left for months? Do they use durable mate­ri­als with breath­able fin­ishes? All of these are vital for the solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tem, and there­fore just because one installer might be cheaper, it doesn’t mean that they are the best bet.

One of the most dan­ger­ous aspects of exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion is bury­ing gas pipes. Many installers do this, as extend­ing them and mov­ing the pipes actu­ally costs quite a lot and adds time and money onto the job. Like­wise soil pipes should always be removed and reat­tached, while boiler flues should also be extended to pro­trude out past the insu­la­tion.

At Be Con­struc­tive we don’t believe in cut­ting cor­ners – there­fore we take the time to extend these gas pipes to ensure that they are never buried. In addi­tion, all soil pipes / gut­ter­ing / boiler flues are treated in the cor­rect man­ner.

One of the other issues with solid wall insu­la­tion is cold bridg­ing.