One of the Building Group members, Yvonne, kindly hosted a well attended Buildings Group meeting last night, which included a couple of new faces.
Her home is a south facing Victorian mid terrace with suspended timber floors and rooms up in the loft. It’s located on Queen Elizabeth’s Walk up near the reservoirs north of Lordship Park.
Yvonne and her partner will be building a wider extension, amongst other work, and recognised that this would be the perfect opportunity to overhaul the rest of the home’s energy efficiency. They took a trip to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales where they received some excellent advice and had the opportunity to get up close and personal with a wide range of high performance building materials and technologies.
The main energy efficiency work which they will be undertaking is challenging.
The dormer roof has all sorts of angles and slopes which make insulating difficult. Multiple materials of varying thicknesses will be needed, but the important thing is to ensure that there is a continuous “tea cosy” (as Fran puts it) of insulation on all surfaces, even if it’s just a modest amount on some surfaces and more on others.
The suspended timber floor needs insulation but has Parquet over the top which means that taking up the floorboards is not possible. Access to the space underneath the floor is very tight across much of the floor area so this could prove a bit of a headache, but there are options which we will cover.
Yvonne is also looking at fitting microgeneration technologies. With the south facing roof, solar hot water and photovoltaics are clearly strong contenders. The feed in tariff is being introduced in April, which makes this a good time to be considering electricity generating technologies, but as always with microgeneration, you need to ensure that your energy consumption has been reduced as far as practicable before investing, which is exactly what Yvonne is doing.
Update: Yvonne has started a blog charting her progress.