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Homeowner Stephen Hegarty purchased contemporary light fixtures and replaced the incandescent bulbs with CFLs
High performance glazing provides more than just energy benefits though. Hegarty's house is within a stone's throw of the M50 and the roar of traffic is hard to ignore from his back garden. Inside though, it's impressively quiet. "The benefit of a triple-glazed window system and a heavily insulated wall is you have less noise pollution inside," Tomás O'Leary says.
Strict attention to air-tightness was another priority. Henco installed an air-tight membrane between the Kooltherm insulation and inner block-work. Windows, roof-lights, doors and other junctions were carefully taped up, and the house scored 2.5ACH (air changes per hour) in a blower door test after the upgrade – well outside the passivhaus standard of 0.6ACH but still excellent for a new build, never mind a renovation. The house meets the passivahus standard in almost every other respect. "When you do the blower door test at the end you realise how draughty the house was before," Hegarty says.
The old garage was knocked to make way for a new extension, which houses the spacious new kitchen and dining room
His next project is to seal air gaps around electrical sockets and other fittings. One of the leakiest spots left is the hatch in the attic bedroom that leads to the small space holding the HRV (heat recovery ventilation) unit. While the hatch sits within an insulated space, it also provides access to the unsealed attic and is thus vulnerable to air leakage.
Heat recovery ventilation is typical in passivhaus-inspired buildings. Here, a Genvex 6kW HRV unit removes warm moist air from kitchens, bathrooms and other wet spaces and pre-heats incoming fresh air that is delivered to bedrooms and other living spaces. Damp air is also extracted from a utility closet downstairs, making it an ideal place to dry clothes passively – an idea Hegarty picked up from Tomás O'Leary.
Heating specialists Biothermal supplied and installed 15m sq of flat plate solar panels
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