External wall insulation Spring work starts now!

There’s a reason it’s called spring cleaning… Spring is the perfect time to start a new project and get your home up to scratch!

If you wish to spice up the exterior of your home this spring, we recommend using silicone render manufactured by EWI Pro. This product comes in a wide array of colours and due to the nature of the silicone, it is self-cleaning, water resistant, and resistant to cracking. This makes it the perfect material to spice up your home and keep your home in great condition for as long as possible even through tough winter months!

The cold weather has (hopefully) passed, leaving many homeowners shockingly aware of how effective their home is at maintaining its heat. With this in mind, and having recovered from the Christmas indulgences, now is the perfect time to have a think about ways that you can improve your home.

Spring is the perfect time for external wall insulation

The ideal time for external wall insulation and rendering is in a mild climate such as spring. So, for any homeowners out there who are considering external wall insulation or rendering, then now is the time! Giving your house a spring clean by re-rendering will ensure that it will look clean and fresh ready for the upcoming summer months when the bright light exacerbates old, cracked or dirty render.

Longer daylight hours and better weather also provide great working conditions for External Wall Insulation installers, allowing them to increase their productivity and with less chance of delays due to weather conditions.

By installing EWI in the spring time, you will not only ensure that your home stays warmer next winter, but it will also prevent heat from entering in the summer months – therefore keeping your home nice and cool!

Spring is always a busy time for External Wall Insulation installers, so be sure to get your project booked in ASAP. If you are in need of an installer, please inquire using our Find An Installer form.

Keep your pets warm in winter!

It’s nearly that time of year when the heating is on full blast and the cat is sitting next to the fire, but do your pets stay warm when you are out of the house?

For those of us who have pets, it is really important to make sure the house is warm enough whilst we are out at work or school. It is easy to forget that temperatures can dip very quickly in the home when the heating is off and everyone is out. No wonder they are usually pleased to see you when you get home!

Of course, you can keep the heating on all day whilst you are out, to make sure they are warm and comfortable, but that can be really expensive. You don’t want to be heating the house for an extra 50 hours a week or more just for your cat or dog.Well you might… but its a lot easier to keep them warm another way.

Your pets will thank you for insulating your home!

Insulation could dramatically reduce your bills if you are leaving the heating on for your pets. Instead of the boiler working all day to keep the temperature up, insulation will slow that heat loss from the house, and ensure that the boiler only needs to kick in occasionally to get up to temperature. You will probably set the thermostat a bit lower for your pets than you would for yourself, so it is even easier for an insulated house to hold temperature during the day.

Why Install External Wall Insulation?

Exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion is fast becom­ing the most pop­u­lar prop­erty home improve­ment here in the UK. There are many rea­sons for this, which we will dis­cuss below.

Before we start though – just a brief reminder on what exactly external solid wall insulation is!

If you have a prop­erty built prior to 1930, the chances are that it will be com­prised of solid wall con­struc­tion. Put sim­ply, this means there is no cav­ity; the two skins of brick that make up the wall are built along­side one another. You can recog­nise a solid wall by the pres­ence of short half bricks in the wall itself (if you look from the out­side) – this is where brick has been laid at 90 degrees to the wall, tying the two skins of brick together.

Unfortunately, this makes this type of wall more difficult to insulate – but certainly not impossible!

Instead of inject­ing the cav­ity (which you would do for newer cav­ity walls), insu­la­tion board is added to either the out­side or the inside of the prop­erty. In a way, this is good because you are not lim­ited by the size of cav­ity on how much insu­la­tion you can add to the wall, but it does have other impli­ca­tions like chang­ing the appear­ance of the out­side of the prop­erty (since the exter­nal wall insu­la­tion nor­mally gets ren­dered) or mak­ing rooms smaller if you attach the insu­la­tion on the inside of the prop­erty.

So why then would you look to insu­late your home with solid wall insu­la­tion?

Heating

The main rea­son for insu­lat­ing your home with solid wall insu­la­tion is to min­imise heat loss, thereby reduc­ing your heat­ing bill.

An easy way to com­pare a property’s heat loss per­for­mance is to look at the u-value, which gives a mea­sure of the ther­mal con­duc­tiv­ity / heat loss through a mate­r­ial. With­out insu­la­tion, solid wall prop­er­ties have a U-Value of around 2.1, com­pared with around 0.27 of an insu­lated one – this is a huge improve­ment. Now for those of you who don’t speak in U-val­ues, lets con­sider the finan­cial sav­ings.

We used to use K-Rend on all our projects, but we now use EWI Pro Supplied by EWI Store

The reasons for this are as follows:

Quality

This one’s simple – EWI Pro’s renders are the best on the market. All of them have been specially designed to withstand challenging weather conditions and stand the test of time. There are five options, and all of them carry their own benefits:

• EWI Pro Silicone Silicate Render is EWI Pro’s most popular render. It is breathable, self-cleaning and water-repelling.EWI Pro Mineral Render is breathable and quick-drying, making it ideal for installing in colder, more humid conditions. It may be possible to use during the cold winter months, when installing solid wall insulation would not normally be an option.
• EWI Pro Acrylic Render is EWI Pro’s most durable render, suitable for use in heavily exposed areas prone to damage.
• EWI Pro Silicone Render is the premium render in their catalogue. It is breathable, flexible and long-lasting. It is available in hundreds of different colours.

• EWI Pro Acrylic Mosaic Render is textured and durable. It forms a finish similar to pebbledash, but is longer-lasting and holds its colour.

We will be happy to talk you through which is the best option for you, as part of your personalised external wall insulation system.

Price

EWI Pro have the most competitive prices on the market. This means a lower end price for customers.

Colours and Sizing

EWI Pro has a huge range of colours and finishes to choose from, giving you huge control over the final appearance of your property. As external wall insulation is a long-term measure, we want you to be happy with the finish. EWI Pro can mix their renders in almost any colour with their state of the art mixing machines. Their through-coloured renders are brilliant, because they won’t show damage or scratches, unlike traditional render with coloured paint over the top.

All EWI Pro’s renders are available in four grain sizes, meaning you can opt for a completely flat finish or a textured one, as you wish.

Speed of delivery

As trusted partners, we know we can rely on EWI Pro to dispatch any materials within 24 hours. This is unique in the industry. It means if we realise near the end of a job that we haven’t got enough render to finish the job, it won’t hold us up. Being able to get hold of materials at short notice means your job can be finished on time and we don’t have to hang around!