What if you live in a well loved home where your children grew up in , you spent many happy years in tat home but you started to resent it , it just wasn’t the warm cosy home you imagined growing old in anymore.
This is the situation that one couple from Oxford had; their home was not performing for them and as they grew older they really started to feel every little draught and gap. But they didnt really know where to start. Other things also played on their mind, such as the environment and climate change and their impact on carbon emissions as the house was so large it required two gas boilers coupled together to cope with the heat demand.
” I just don’t want to feel cold anymore and worry about the heating bills” , these were the words of our homeowner and its not an uncommon scenario.
This thought started them on their Retrofit journey, although they didnt quite know it as yet and they found a local community group , Low Carbo Oxford North that run some brilliant homeowner engagement sessions, called their housewarming Series to help homeowners in their situation; keen to learn and looking for answers.
This journey lead then to get in touch with Cosy Homes Oxfordshire, a one stop retrofit shop who we worked with on this project to undertake an extensive whole house retrofit to both upgrade and future proof their home.
The house, built in 1909 still had the original sash windows, these were all replaced with high performance contemporary casement triple glazed timber windows, the windows were repositioned into the planned external wall insulation using a clever Winframer structural insulation to mitigate thermal bridges and reduce the psi values associated with the installation of the windows tpo ensure they perform as well as possible and included airtightness detailing by taping the windows internally and externally using specialist tapes from SIGA .The External wall insulation specified by EWI Pro was 100mm Rockwool Duoslab with a thin coat silicon render system to reduce the wall U values to 0.3w/m2K and new loft insulation was added to 400mm alongside an airtight Welhofer Loft hatch.
FInally the ventilation system of the house was upgraded using Venti Decentralised CMEV units in the wet rooms and concealed trickle vents in the habitable rooms and to reduce the heat losses from the suspended floor a number of Airex smart airbricks were installed.
The homeowners took the brave step to make some radical changes to their home but they are now reaping the rewards, they have reduced their fuel consumption significantly but key to the project outcome is that they now appreciate their home is an oasis of comfort and are now looking at introducing renewables. They feel that their future is now more secure and their home is more energy resilient and no longer a burden that would be passed onto future generations.