External Wall Insulation ~ The Ugly Truth?

I doubt it's fire proof. Essentially flammable cladding. Another Grenfel type situation?

Interesting matter. I have seen some external insulation cost, eg for a ground floor house of 100 sqm, the cost is around 20k€, but closer to 25k€ to cover all delicate part to do. If you expect 300€ to 500€ less for heating the house per year (normal price like 2k€ or 3k€ per year), the profitability is 83 y (300€ per y) or 50 y (500€ per y). So, doing this is a peanut, better to build new home with very good insulation.
By your experience, can you give some profitability after insulation ?

It is just common sense when you insulate your house to also put in a system to ventilate the moisture away from the house. Remember it is call HVAC for a reason.

Alot of these foreign guys working for companies have no clue, done a nasty job in my house window frames etc are all bent, nasty plastering

Top drawer

If you render your house regardless of area (listed status, conservation, national park), even in a “normal” area you need planning permission if the house wasn’t already rendered. Also if you render more than 25% you need to notify the building control department as they may force you to apply EWI. We rendered our house, farm house, middle of nowhere, not listed or in a special location and the council served us with a enforcement notice then made us submit a full planning application, which the council then refused the application and we are now taking it up with the inspectorate. This is such a grey area and the reality is that we may have to remove the very expensive modern render system and go back to a damp cold house, be warned it is a nightmare having these childish council jobsworths on our backs.

Very valuable information, thank you

I have hygrometer in my flat.
Landlords should just hang a hygrometer in every room, so the tennant has a better control of the humity in the rooms.

I live in a cave. My skinny girlfriend wants me to keep a fire going all the time. I'm going to trade her for a fat girlfriend.

I have been talking about this problem for 20 years. A person consumes about 17 cubic meters of air in one night. In order for moisture to be properly distributed inside the walls, the mass of the wall is needed, which will move the vapor barrier inside the wall, and that the wall is made of material that is vapor permeable /brick or brick block/. Unfortunately, another mistake is made here, which is painting the walls with water-washable acrylic paints that are limited in vapor permeability. Thus, by saving energy, people seriously endanger their health, that is, they endanger the humidity of the living space. And finally, how air conditioners or dehumidifiers work in your home: When you want to cool down a space, you extract moisture from the air, and that is the condensate that is removed from each internal unit of the split heating and cooling system. Here we return to the effect of thermal insulation from the beginning, which should save us energy that we have to spend later on dehumidifying and thus cooling the space in which we live. And finally, with good thermal insulation, there should be no wet places even on parts of reinforced vertical and horizontal cerclages, and with 3-layer, not 2-layer windows, the biggest thermal bridges in the space prone to vapor condensation, which are windows, are reduced. There is still much to talk about external thermal insulation and wall materials, but the fact is that a good part of the energy that you save in such a house in the winter must be spent in the summer for cooling, not because of insolation but because of the activities that are carried out in the house and the temperature that I am a human being. creates with its heat, cooking, washing machines, refrigerators ... The American system of prefabricated construction where the walls have no accumulation at all is the simplest because it relies only on split heating and cooling systems and their quality of automatic humidity regulation. Due to climate change, the traditional European system of solid construction no longer meets the standards of a healthy and economical life. Conclusion: No matter what modifications we try to economize energy consumption, it greatly affects our health and, at most, our budget. P.S. I hope that google translate translated this text correctly.

Idiots story

Basic building science, insulate tight, ventilate right. You also need to understand the building regs as well. Especially Part B as well as part L. Before you go ahead, have a chat with your local building control and planning department.

Interesting. Thank you.

what do you think about nuaire drymaster ventillation systems to stop condensation ?

Great video , explaining the issue in simple terms

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE take note of the dehumidifier emphasis in this video. Running a dehumidifier will not only take the moisture away, but will help reduce your heating costs, as you won't be heating the invisible moisture clouds in your rooms. It's easy to run them with smart plugs when your out of the house, and then you won't have the noise of them to deal with while watching tv etc.

Passifyer vents are usually good for venting.

95% at U=0.1, 5% at U=2 … you’ve just doubled your heat loss. It’s why loft hatches are important.

Godsake, just stick to the technical stuff please your personal views on insulate britain are pretty jarring and dont actually add any value to the content! You just sound like a grumpy old tart right from the off.

Awesome explanation as usual 👍

How about a ventilator with a humidity sensor in the bathroom? Leave a little gap under the door and the thing will pull in humid air until you have 60% humidity or whatever your preference is.

Omg are you the third world or the remnants of the second great empire ever?

Rockwool works wet or dry

This why you need engineers when renovating older houses. These contractors aren't thinking about condensation points and cold bridges, they're thinking about the correct way to install their product and how to do it so that they get profits.

The engineer on the project is the one to figure out how the insulation makes the rest of the building behave. You can calculate where the moisture condenses (approximately) and you can manage it in a few ways, like moisture barriers, HVAC and other structural methods.

I live in Finland and we have similar problems. People wreck their houses by doing renovations they have no clue about.

Also activists are useless idiots who pick up a random topic to be mad about to make themselves feel important. No one should ever listen to activists...

HOW about insulation both outside and the inside for the house. e.g Aluminum cladding- cavity drip vent timber batten-50mm xps - building paper 20 series- concrete block then xps 50mm gibboard - Does anyone have a problem with construction. Getting a PS1 going to be fun.

Consequences of this expensive government scheme (remember to include the removal of insulation when we realise the problems it will inevitably cause):
More energy use on dehumidifying! (And noise)
Black mould in a sealed house.
All the wood will rot where that moisture collects.
Money down the drain. As well as stone wall houses being further degraded by modern products.
And don’t forget all the chemicals that will inevitably end up in the environment (the plastics, the glues).

I think the point of this video is that UK building standards are 18th-19th century. Ventilation and insulation is like witchcraft to most of builders

GREAT points made nobody thinks of that

I'm about to have this done, very good info, thank you

Good info for those considering such external insulation. Your criticism of Insulate Britain protesters would seem to be somewhat out of you area of expertise. Moisture issues might be resolved if good ventilation is achieved. I have an air source heat pump and MVHR (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) which has been fairly good for the last 13 years (and loads of insulation too). Do keep up the good work (where your expertise lies).

Thank you for the excellent information. Am about to get wall insulation very useful.

Shame you don't approve of people's right to protest. I guess you still remember emily pankhurst.

I do not like the 'gluing' onto the wall it feels very tacky. More, I do not like the apparent obsession with nasty rendered over the outside. More need to be done with removable, fixable, cladding not daft render. All of which should be made easy for DIY. Anyone can screw a few battens to a wall, bit of polystyrene between etc. Nail or screw cladding over the top.

I have insulated with Armaflex on the inside of the coldest bedrooms. Easypeacy and seems to work great. Like to hear everyones comments/negatives.

Very useful, clear and informative.

In Ireland they remove everything. They even move the windows out to the edge of the wall to achieve the same look before the insulation was added. They remove the gutters and down pipes . They fit heat pumps as part of the package which is subsidised by the government.

strofoam would be fire hazard

Have you had any experience with cork sol rendering. The marketing sounds great but finding it hard to finds any real reviews.

Wow. Defending incompetent careless designers & installers and blaming protesters instead. What a useless uninformed ^&*$£^.

Thing is if this costs us say £10k to retrofit it how many years would it take to pay off that with heating costs. As for damp, I get a bit of mould in one bedroom and I have one of those humidity blocks that costs me about £15 for 4 of them and it gives me the whole winter. No more mould.

Councils are doing this to many homes up north,and if they do it will tragically fail just like all the other hair brained schemes.
Why not just insulate inside the walls?,with thermal wall paper .
let's face it the old days knew their stuff ,plenty of air circulation .
Now these Dicks want you to sufficate

Is there any clue/rumours suggesting that some (all) of these insulation materials will be banned in the foreseeable future? Especially considering the upcoming climate/green agreements/policies and natural deterioro the materials themselves . Thanks for the video, very informative and insightful

So what you're saying is that if you hire incompetent insulation fitters that are too lazy to actually do the job properly, then the job won't be done properly?

Sounds like a problem of you only going off best price in an offer without specifying what needs to be done.

So yeah if you stinge you cringe. Nothing new there.

Hate these clickbait titles with a question mark.

- moisture in the structure will not freeze until the dew point is reached
- warm air can contain more moisture than cold air. 40% at +20C will have much more moisture than 80% at 0C not to mention -20C
- that's why in winter, in a room with "normal humidity" there is more humidity than outside and the partial pressure of steam pushes everywhere it can penetrate
- in nature, everything tries to get in balance
- that's why in winter the constructions dry out in our climatic conditions
- if drying is not blocked to the outside, for example with foam or vapor-impermeable plaster or paint - there is no place for dew to fall, then the moisture will dry without freezing!
- I already mentioned a couple of disasters before, under normal conditions +20 60% in the room, a lot of moisture will accumulate in the aerated concrete wall during the winter, which will not be able to dry out quickly enough.
- if you live at +20, 40% and there is no bathroom near the outer walls, then everything will be fine even if you insulate with a sufficiently thick layer of foam, the moisture that will condense in the winter will have time to dry out in the summer.
-but if you apply foam of insufficient thickness, it can freeze through and then it will really freeze, but if there was cotton wool, then no problem even in this case.

If you bodge it then youll have problems, same with anything. If you insulate behind the meterbox, the vent pipe, gatepost etc. make sure theres no coldbridges and itll work perfectly. If the the buildings airtight it needs an mvhr.

I had consensation in my flat for years. The flat is over 100 years old with 9" brick walls with no cavity. I put double glazing in with trickle ventilstion. That helped a little. I eventually insulated a wall that had no windows or doors in it so there were no problems doing it. I put the insulation on the inside of the wall. I used PIR board. I put a hole in the front and back of the flat to provide ventilation to reduce the condensation. I still had a problem on the walls with windows on them. Eventually I discovered that there is plasterboard that has 17mm thick insulation on it. I removed the old 38mm thick plaster and replaced it with this plasterboard. It was the same thickness as the original plaster so it did not interfere with the windows in any way. Again, this was all done on the inside of the wall. This makes the walls lose half as much heat as a 9" solid wall. After this there was no condensation on the walls at all. I found that I had to insulate every wall to get rid of the condensation. The condensation just kept looking for the coldest walls to land on just as this video says.

I also put in double glazed doors but this did not help with the condensation but it made the flat a little warmer and kept out the mice because there are no gaps around the door frame. I also insulated under the floor with solid PIR insulation held in place by thick chicken wire (fibreglass might get damp and mouldy). This helps a little. What realy made a difference was insulting all the central heating and cold water pipework under the timber floor with Bye Law 30 insulation (in the UK) (it is twice as thick as the cheap pipework insulation that is easy to get hold of). I think that this was probably the main reason why the mice went away. I noticed that the mice lived where all the hot pipes came out of the boiler. I also took all the skirtings off and put mortar behind them and reinstalled new skirting to reduce draughts and stop the mice coming in. I increased the ventilation under the floor to keep it dry and make it colder for the mice. I removed all the soil (which was moist) under the floors that the builders left there 100 years ago. By doing this in small bits over the years it did not cost a fortune. Now I don't have any problems with the flat and it is cheap to heat. It was disruptive but is an elegant and permanent solution to a number of problems. It is cheaper than external insulation.

Would it be easier to use say superfoil and insulate inside rather than outside ? I know you'd need to plasterboard it up too so you'd loose a bit of room inside but ?

My first labourer job was doing just that. Can't remember if we moved the gas meter, but everything else was moved to enable us to board the whole house. The scheme changed the windows and put new window sills. Was done very well.

It had not occurred to me that EWI could be a DIY job, thanks for the idea.