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.

What exactly is cold bridging?

This is when the insu­la­tion is not con­sis­tent across the whole of the sur­face that is due to be insu­lated and there­fore it will be an area of sig­nif­i­cant heat loss, imag­ine for exam­ple using 20mm insu­la­tion instead of the 100mm EPS insu­la­tion that we nor­mally use just in a small area. The issue here is that not only would heat loss be higher through the 20mm area, on the inside of the prop­erty, this could be an area where con­den­sa­tion occurs.

At External Wal Insulation company, we ensure that the solid wall insu­la­tion is applied cor­rectly across every sur­face that requires insu­la­tion. This includes every­thing from the dow­els to the mechan­i­cal fix­ings and the cills to the pipework. When apply­ing the mechan­i­cal fix­ings, we cut away a sec­tion of the EPS in order to care­fully apply­ing the fix­ings. Then, using pre-cut sec­tions, the holes are plugged with EPS to avoid any cold bridg­ing. Many installers cut costs by ham­mer­ing in the mechan­i­cal fix­ings, which causes irrepara­ble dam­age to the EPS.

Fin­ished exter­nal solid wall insu­la­tion might look really good once the ren­der is applied, but it is impor­tant that you use an expe­ri­enced installer of solid wall insu­la­tion, to ensure there is suf­fi­cient time to dry and set, we find many installers rush through the instal­la­tion in order to cut costs. So while the end result might look good for a few days or weeks, as it starts to fall off the wall, you might wish you had paid a bit more and gone with a bet­ter solid wall insu­la­tion installer!

A good solid wall insu­la­tion installer should take at least 5 days to fin­ish even a very small job once the dry­ing times have been taken into account. If they sug­gest they can fin­ish it over a week­end, be very cau­tious.

Using the right materials!

Lots of installers use PIR board­ing as the insu­lat­ing mate­r­ial, as costs are reduced, and they can offer a thin­ner result. We won’t touch PIR board (even though sup­pli­ers call us on a daily basis to use their prod­ucts) – the rea­son for this is that PIR boards shrink about 2% over the course of just a cou­ple of years. This can cause huge cracks to appear in the sys­tem and for it to sub­se­quently fail. If you are going to take one thing away from this blog it would be this – Don’t use PIR board for solid wall insu­la­tion!

Charging for waste material

One cost that an installer may unfairly pass onto a cus­tomer at the end of a job is the amount of waste that remains. Pro­fes­sional teams man­age mate­ri­als well, mean­ing that fewer amounts are required to be ordered ini­tially, thus cre­at­ing sav­ings that can be passed on. The stor­age of mate­ri­als is also impor­tant, pro­fes­sional installers will always keep the site clean and safe.

If you are inter­ested in see­ing what else sets us apart from other solid wall insu­la­tion installers, call us today! We install solid wall insu­la­tion across Lon­don and we are cer­ti­fied to install the insu­la­tion under PAS2030 (Green Deal and GDHIF).