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In light of the current economic conditions, an increasing number of Irish people are turning away from buying new homes, instead deciding to make the most of what they’ve got by extending and refurbishing. Lenny Antonelli visited one such house nearing completion in Glasnevin that uses a combination of materials and techniques to aim for highly sustainable results
Gerard and Ellen Menezes had little choice but to renovate the end-of-terrace Glasnevin home they bought in 2003. “For our first winter here we had all single-glazed aluminium windows and there was no insulation at all,” Ellen Menezes says. “You could see your breath it was so cold. We’d have the heating going full belt, and our bills were huge.”
Space was also an issue for the Menezes’s and their two young children. “The house came with planning permission to extend and we wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. It’s not that big, it was only 78 square metres.”
The couple are nearing completion of a refurb and extension that has boosted the building energy rating (BER) of the house from a D2 to B1. They received three offers for the upgrade, with the mid-priced and winning tender coming from green builders Viking House, who insulated the house externally and added a 65 square metre closed-panel timber frame extension. Viking House’s Seamus O’Loughlin is keen to stress that green extensions needn’t be prohibitively expensive. “For the price of a normal extension, you can get a factory-built passive extension, lifted over with a crane, that can be finished in a few weeks,” he says.
Other bidders offered more conventional upgrades, but for Ellen Menezes the intention was always to go green. “That was always the plan,” she says. “It’s just what’s important to us. My sister is a sustainable architect. (My interest) probably comes from as far back as when my father did building, and we got to see some of the building materials and how they perform.”
Having previously dry-lined parts of their sitting room and kitchen, the Menezes’s had witnessed builders struggle with green building materials. “When we got the Homatherm (a wood-fibre insulation product from Ecological Building Systems) before, our previous builder looked at us and presumed it must have been for the attic. But we said no, it’s for the walls. He hadn’t worked with the materials. So this time we said we wanted to work with somebody who knew how to use them.”
Limerick-based insulation specialists Aerobord supplied the 100mm of expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulation added externally to the front and back of the house, originally built from pre-cast concrete. “We used polystyrene because the walls weren’t breathable anyway,” O’Loughlin says. Ellen Menezes admits she wasn’t aware of external insulation before Viking House recommended it. “When Seamus mentioned that we could clad on the outside, it seemed like a brilliant option because the house is so small.”
Externally, the EPS 100 was finished with a fibreglass-reinforced cementitious plaster from Weber. The refurbished walls were brought up to a U-value of 0.22 W/m2K. An air gap between the polystyrene insulation and original wall allows moisture to dry out. “It allows any moisture that's built up to be redistributed to areas which are drier. If there's a damp patch it'll spread it over a big surface area,” O'Loughlin says. The old attic was insulated with cellulose to an average depth of about 400mm, boosting the U-value from 0.35W/m2K to 0.2W/m2K.
Viking House installed a new boiler too – a 90 per cent efficient Ravenheat modulating condensing gas combination boiler. Unlike conventional boilers, combination boilers heat water on demand, so they don’t need storage tanks and consume less energy, though they sometimes have a lower flow rate. Underfloor heating is installed downstairs in the new extension and in the new ensuite upstairs, while radiators heat the original house.
100mm of expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulation was installed externally on the front and back of the end-of-terrace house, giving the refurbished walls a U-value of 0.22 W/m2K. The EPS was finished externally with a fibreglass-reinforced cementitious render from Weber
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