upgrade
‘Comfort in the house has improved very significantly with very little energy’ of Sustainable Building Services, whose buildings have achieved some of Ireland’s best airtightness results, at a nearly zero energy building (NZEB) open day event in 2013. O’Donovan had just completed a passive house retrofit for Doris Knoebel in Clonakilty (as featured in issue 7 of Passive House Plus). “Mick was one of our visitors and he saw what we were doing there,” say O’Donovan. “He knew what he wanted to do since he’s an engineer himself and had been looking for someone to do the work for him, so he commissioned us then.” about how much time he subsequently wasted in trying to find a contractor who understood what he wanted. “I have lost count of the number of so-called low-energy builders I interviewed who didn’t understand the concept of a thermal bridge, airtightness or building physics.” Kiernan finally met contractor Tim O’Donovan
The match sounds like it was destined to work out well given both parties’ strong belief in doing things properly and thoroughly. O’Donovan says: “It’s the old adage of do it once and do it properly and not have to go back, and Mick was very much of that mindset, which is fantastic.” So with this meeting of like-minds, the building fabric works began in July 2014, and went on
for six months. As part of the latest upgrade works, Grainger Energy Solutions externally insulated the walls with high density Rockwool. Kiernan had previously hoovered loose fill polystyrene bead from the wall cavity and had it fully filled with platinum bead. O’Donovan replaced the old concrete roof tiles and felt with new clay tiles and a Siga wind-tight breather membrane, while some rafters were re-aligned and box-ends re-constructed. The floor of the cold attic was also heavily insulated with cellulose above the existing joists, and the new external wall insulation rises up to meet the attic insulation. The new triple-glazed windows were also set flush with the outer wall and airtightened against the inner leaf walls, while the external insulation also wraps the window frames. The before and after pictures of the house reveal how much u
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