Adhere to building regs and keep valuable internal space with EWI

Any­one who has taken on a retro­fit project on a prop­erty will undoubt­edly know the dif­fi­culty in adher­ing to the cur­rent build­ing reg­u­la­tions. Get­ting the u-value of an exter­nal wall down to 0.3 W/m²k is no small feet to be hon­est and when space is a pre­mium, espe­cially here in Lon­don, there is noth­ing worse than pay­ing so much for a prop­erty only to then have to reduce the inter­nal use­able space because of the insu­la­tion require­ments.

Adhere to building regs with solid wall insulation

This is not a prob­lem if you use exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion though – you will keep all the inter­nal space – and bet­ter still there is no upheaval of any inter­nal sur­face, so there is no need to move kitchen units or extend pipework to move radi­a­tors.

The whole exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion job can be done from out­side the prop­erty (pro­vided water and elec­tric­ity are pro­vided to run the tools!), although you may have you win­dows cov­ered for a week or so while the job is car­ried out – this means no mess in the prop­erty!

With inter­nal space val­ued in excess of £5,000 per metre squared in Lon­don, any­thing you can do to keep this usable space in tact when you move in is obvi­ously a huge pos­i­tive.

The ben­e­fits of solid wall insu­la­tion don’t just stop there though – the insu­la­tion will reduce your energy bills and also pro­tect the under­ly­ing brick­work.

Why exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion is the answer – and a cav­ity wall insulation isn’t

Prop­er­ties built before the 1930s are almost always built with a sin­gle skin of brick, which leads to rapid heat loss, expen­sive heat­ing bills and a cold house. These prop­er­ties are now being retro-fit­ted with 100mm of exter­nal wall insu­la­tion, which brings down the U-Value, or heat trans­fer, to bet­ter than build­ing reg­u­la­tions. This means that the retro-fit­ted walls are becom­ing more energy effi­cient than new build prop­er­ties. How­ever, after the 1930s, build­ings started to be con­structed with a gap in between two skins of brick. This was designed to slow down the heat trans­fer from inside to out­side, and increase the effi­ciency of the prop­erty. The prob­lem is that these cav­ity walls were con­structed with­out any insu­la­tion, mean­ing that the heat trans­fer is still fairly rapid. There­fore mil­lions of peo­ple have now had these retro-fit­ted with insu­la­tion pumped into the cav­ity. How­ever, there is one prob­lem, it’s sim­ply not good enough.

Why do cav­ity walls have lim­i­ta­tions

A typ­i­cal cav­ity wall built prior to the 80’s has a gap of only 40mm. So you can fill this with as much insu­la­tion as you can squeeze in, but at the end of the day, when com­par­ing it to 100mm of exter­nal wall insu­la­tion you wont get any­where near the same effi­ciency. This explains why we get lots of peo­ple say­ing that their prop­erty is still cold after inject­ing their cav­i­ties with insu­la­tion. Although it’s a much cheaper method, it doesn’t get you towards cur­rent build­ing reg­u­la­tions.

External Wall Insulation – not just a winter warmer!

Every­one assumes that insu­la­tion is installed to help keep the home warm dur­ing the colder win­ter months.

The actual pur­pose of insu­la­tion is to slow the rate at which the tem­per­a­ture equi­lib­rium is met – that is to say the tem­per­a­ture inside and out­side the home are the same. While unlikely it would ever hap­pen, if you didn’t turn on any heat­ing in a house, even­tu­ally the inside tem­per­a­ture would match the exter­nal tem­per­a­ture – this is when the house would be in equi­lib­rium.

For­tu­nately for all of us it takes time for this to hap­pen, but it does hap­pen – and the big­ger the dif­fer­ence in tem­per­a­tures the quicker it hap­pens. How much quicker does your house feel cold in the win­ter months com­pared to the spring when the heat­ing goes off?

Slowing the rate at which temperature equilibrium is met!

The role of insu­la­tion is to slow the rate at which this tem­per­a­ture equi­lib­rium is met. As you might expect, a thicker layer of insu­la­tion will help slow down this move­ment of heat fur­ther. This means that even if the weather is extremely cold dur­ing the win­ter months, it will take much longer for the warm air in the home to cool down – this is the energy sav­ings we talk about.

The great news, and one that we have recently had high­lighted to us by one of our cus­tomers was the impact of the insu­la­tion dur­ing the recent heat wave we had here in the UK. Obvi­ously 35 degrees is quite nice if you are sat on the beach and have air con­di­tion­ing, but here in the UK we just aren’t ready for those types of tem­per­a­ture. We don’t have air con­di­tion­ing and so forth, so when it gets hot it nor­mally becomes uncom­fort­ably hot in the home, mean­ing dif­fi­culty in get­ting to sleep and other unfor­tu­nate side effects.

Installing Solid Wall Insulation in the winter months

In the UK, we nor­mally expe­ri­ence quite pro­longed peri­ods of cold weather dur­ing the win­ter months. This cou­pled with the reduced day­light really ham­per the abil­ity to install solid wall insu­la­tion dur­ing those months. The dif­fer­ent lay­ers within the solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tem take longer to dry and there­fore this can drive up the cost of instal­la­tion since the works take longer to com­plete. Another issue is the potential rainfall during the autumn and winter months, which can result in water ingress and damp. Read more about damp here!

The great news is that we can offer the EWI Pro fast dry­ing win­ter min­eral ren­der sys­tem dur­ing these cooler months at no extra cost to home­own­ers. The sys­tem dries that much quicker than our Sil­i­cone Sil­i­cate ren­der solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tem and there­fore it allows us to carry out the install in the same time frame despite the weather being cooler and our teams being on site for shorter peri­ods of time.

Quick Drying Adhesives & Renders!

The main com­po­nent of our win­ter solid wall sys­tem is EWI-221, a quick dry­ing adhe­sive, that offers many of the same unique qual­i­ties of our EWI-220 and EWI-225 adhe­sives (the ones we use nor­mally for EPS and min­eral wool respec­tively), except it goes off much quicker. This adhe­sive is incred­i­bly strong and so we are still able to offer our 25 year war­ranty on our win­ter solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tems.

If you have got fund­ing via a Gov­ern­ment scheme like GDHIF or a local bor­ough Green Deal Com­mu­nity Fund then it might be a pre-req­ui­site that you install the solid wall insu­la­tion and claim your grant by a cer­tain time. By offer­ing our win­ter sys­tem, Be Con­struc­tive can now install solid wall insu­la­tion all year around – help­ing peo­ple meet the strict dead­lines on their grant vouch­ers. We’ve also put together a blog detailing tips for rendering in the rain and adverse weather.

If you would like to install solid wall insu­la­tion on your prop­erty, why not give us a call. We work under the PAS2030 frame­work, which means we can install under the Gov­ern­ment Green Deal and Green Deal Home Improve­ment scheme. We also offer reg­u­lar train­ing to all our employ­ees ensur­ing they are using the lat­est tech­niques and also that they are adher­ing to our strict qual­ity con­trol require­ments.

If you want piece of mind that you are get­ting an expe­ri­enced installer to insu­late your prop­erty – call London’s favourite solid wall insu­la­tion installer, Be Con­struc­tive Ltd to see if we can help with your insu­la­tion project!