External wall insulation Wimbledon

Repairing badly installed external wall insulation Wimbledon

Back in the sum­mer we got a call from a des­per­ate home­owner in Wim­ble­don who had been taken for a ride by their EWI Installer. The installer in ques­tion had sim­ply given up the install mid-works leav­ing the prop­erty in a ter­ri­ble con­di­tion.

This badly installed exter­nal wall insu­la­tion was even done under the government’s GDHIF scheme – it doesn’t pro­vide home­own­ers with a huge amount of con­fi­dence when works can be car­ried out to this poor stan­dard even under one of their own schemes!

Any­way – we were invited to come and take a look at the prop­erty and quote for the repair works to the insu­la­tion. It quickly became appar­ent we needed to start again – remov­ing the exist­ing insu­la­tion so we had a blank can­vas to start with. The main rea­son was that the EPS boards had not been cor­rectly attached to the walls. The EPS insu­la­tion boards are nor­mally bed­ded upon adhe­sive (some com­pa­nies use dry sys­tems with no adhe­sive but this is not rec­om­mended) which helps adhere them to the wall. This installer had decided to cut cor­ners and only apply adhe­sive to some of the boards – we were ner­vous that this wouldn’t last – so we made the deci­sion to remove every­thing and start again.

In the pic­ture of the exist­ing works car­ried out by the first installer, notice the lay­out of the fix­ings – this is not in accor­dance with any manufacturer’s solid wall insu­la­tion sys­tem.

In the pho­tos you can see the guys remov­ing the exist­ing insu­la­tion boards – you can also see on the wall where the boards have been removed the remain­ing adhe­sive (or lack of it). Under the GDHIF scheme, any exter­nal wall insu­la­tion sys­tem is backed by a 25 year guar­an­tee – there is sim­ply no way this would of lasted – to be hon­est we are not sure how the installer even got the nec­es­sary accred­i­ta­tions to install this type of insu­la­tion in the first place!

From where we started, we are pretty happy with the end result, as more impor­tantly was the cus­tomer! The exter­nal wall insu­la­tion sys­tem was fin­ished with a 1.5mm Sil­i­cone Sil­i­cate ren­der – this was applied on top of 100mm EPS board tak­ing the u-value down from 2.1 down to just 0.28w/m2k – which is bet­ter the required level of a brand new house built today.