Retrofit and Traditional Building Renovation
What is Retrofit?
Many people may have heard of the term Retrofit but are not sure what it means.
Retrofit is about making your home more comfortable, reducing the running costs especially in the face of rising fuel prices, reducing your carbon footprint and looking at using renewable energy sources such as Solar panels.
What do we offer in Retrofit?
The general approach to Retrofit is using a Fabric First Approach. This means looking at the Fabric elements of your home, the walls, roof, floors, windows which are the areas where you lose heat and seeing what could be improved.
We work closely with other Retrofit Professionals including Architects , Retrofit Coordinators , Retrofit Assessors who may assess a home and make a plan and work closely with the client.
We work closely with Cosy Homes Oxfordshire where we are approved Contractors with Retrofit Works and undertake Whole House deep retrofits.
Examples of works we may undertake include using Internal Wall Insulation with Woodfibre and lime plaster, applying an Insulating Lime plaster Render such as diathonite, installing new high performance windows and installing ventilation systems.
Nikki is a recent AECB Carbonlite graduate and undertaking her Level 5 certification in Retrofit Coordination and Risk Management
Find out more about our retrofit journey here!
Airtightness and Retrofit
Retrofit and Airtightness
Key to any good retrofit is to consider airtightness
Why is this important?
Traditionally our homes have been built as pretty leaky, lots of draughts through cracks in the fabric, junctions, windows and doors as the houses were built with open fires that needed a good supply of air.
But this also means a lot of heat and energy losses and really counter to trying to create an energy efficient home.
Simple measures to improve the airtightness include draught proofing windows, secondary glazing, blocking up gaps in the masonry .
More advanced techniques include a specific Airtightness strategy with the use of specialist tapes, membrane and liquid vapour barriers.
We recently created a number of training rigs that were purpose made for an Airtightness Workshop at the Net Zero Skills hub at Abingdon and Witney college.
Find out a bit more about this here
Find out more about Retrofit here!
If you are thinking about retrofit but are not sure where to start or you have plans and looking for an experienced contractor then get in touch
Check out a few of our case studies