Issue 9, Vol 5 Out Now
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Featured Article
| For peat's sake |
Up till now, the activities of semi-state energy companies like Bord na Móna, ESB & Bord Gais have not won the favour of environmentalists. Richard Douthwaite explains how that situation is destined to rapidly change, and exclusively reveals details of the ambitious new green direction being adopted by Bord na Móna.
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Official magazine of Easca  |
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Breaking the mould - part I |
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Thursday, 21 May 2009 |
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Page 1 of 7
Ill-considered attempts to upgrade a building’s thermal performance can not only fail to save energy, but can also create serious problems for occupant health and building structure alike. Leading green designer Joseph Little of Joseph Little Architects investigates the particular problems associated with dry-lining single-leaf concrete block walls
This article is the first of a series looking at upgrade options and issues associated with single-leaf walls of existing houses. This article will focus on insulated dry-lined concrete block walls of the ubiquitous housing estate house. This will include the findings of software that dynamically models moisture movement through the wall over several years. The article following this will look at a range of options for replacing existing dry-lining or installing dry-lining where it never was before, be that for a solid block wall of a 1950s house or a solid brick wall of an 1850s house.
In the last while I’ve been struck by two things in my practice: firstly, how many middle class clients with good jobs are now in doubt as to how much finance they can commit to making their house more energy efficient due to the crisis in the banking sector and voluntary or imposed stringency measures and secondly, how many of those relatively wealthy clients live in houses with no insulation at all, excluding perhaps 75mm of collapsed glass wool in the attic and less wrapped ineffectually around the cylinder. A six bedroom house in Foxrock, built in the mid 90s, with an appalling e5,000 a year heating bill comes to mind. The Home Energy Saving (HES) scheme is coming at exactly the right time to give confidence and fiscal aid to those who wish to make their houses more energy-efficient and comfortable, and also for a construction industry that badly needs employment.
Therefore all praise to minister Eamon Ryan and SEI for launching the HES scheme on 8 February. For the first time ever any owner of an existing home can access grant aid to better insulate their houses and heat them more efficiently. A total of e50m is allotted in 2009. If the scheme is widely adopted it could have a huge positive impact on national carbon emissions, energy efficiency and health if done well. The caveat is key: for this author ‘done well’ means renovating with a keen awareness of building physics, insulation, air-tightness, moisture movement, potential mould growth, ventilation and health. Doing the work well means that Irish builders, designers and specifiers need to re-think some aspects of how we build. We must make sure not to repeat mistakes of the past and homeowners must be ready to challenge pat solutions.
Health & home
Why this focus on mould, ventilation and health when thermally upgrading a house? Here are two of many reasons: Firstly, our population has the fourth highest incidence of asthma in the world and allergies are rising fast. Recently the World Health Organisation has found that as many as a third of Irish children now have asthma. Secondly, studies in other countries have found a close correlation between these diseases and the environments we spend so much of our time in: homes, offices and schools. In one study of 328 homes in southeast France, selected because residents had been admitted to hospital sick, Dr André Charpin1 and his colleagues found mould infestation in 44 per cent, mite contamination in 32 per cent and volatile organic compound (VOC) exposure in 9 per cent of the homes.
The issue of houses contributing to the ill-health of their occupants is not to do with ‘air-tight’ houses as some lobbies would say. We still probably have less than a hundred living units in the country where air infiltration has been reduced to 3m3/m2/h under pressure test conditions. The issue is hundreds of thousands of semi-leaky houses with no managed ventilation system, and little focus on moisture movement and the chemical constituents of building materials and furnishings. Ironically the houses of our great-grandparents which had gales blowing through them, roaring fires (giving good radiant heat) and a small range of natural building materials were healthier places than those we’ve been building for the last thirty years.
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