Life & Style

Forget a new kitchen: Retrofitting your home is a better investment

Spend it Better: Insulation, insulation, insulation is the new mantra in housing

Insulation once again: building regulations now make retrofitting standard practice. Photograph: Getty

Catherine Cleary's face
Catherine Cleary
Sun Sep 5 2021 - 06:00

Our 99-year-old house has seen a lot. We live in a Dublin neighbourhood where many of the houses have been in the same families for decades. A neighbour’s uncle remembered the woman in whose home we now live. She used to serve tea with cream from a can squirted on top. It was, he said, an acquired taste.

We bought the house more than 15 years ago “requiring some modernisation”. My mum thought we were bananas. Our version of modernisation was to retrofit the hell out of it, getting an almost century-old building fit for the next century. A wedge of budget was spent on things that we would never see again: insulation tucked between joists in walls, installed under the floor slab, bolted on to the front and plastered over along with things like triple glazed windows.

Retrofitting houses to make them more energy efficient is going to be a huge part of getting our carbon emissions down, with a commitment to getting half a million homes to a B2 energy rating in the next nine years. That’s more than 1,000 homes a week.

If you have cash to spend on your home it is tempting to go for the new kitchen but our retrofit has paid for itself in energy savings, which is not something a chilly granite countertop will ever do. We built a new timber-framed extension with super-sized amounts of insulation. External insulation (bubble-gum pink slabs, meshed and rendered) brought the concrete walls of the existing house up to spec. We made it as airtight as possible and installed a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery system, a box in the attic that acts like the lungs of the house, keeping it breathing.

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Back in those days, we had to bolt it all together with a separate energy adviser, engineer, builder and suppliers. Now, building regulations make this kind of retrofitting standard practice. And the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland has helped establish one-stop shops for individual householders. See seai.ie One of the most impressive is Electric Ireland's Superhomes, which takes you from the "requiring modernisation" stage through to cosy energy efficient home without having to put your life on hold to project manage the operation.

Not only is there better expertise but there are better grants, including the Warmer Homes Scheme, a retrofitting grant that covers costs for people on a range of social welfare payments. This scheme was hit by Covid as the work was deemed not to be essential. It is now utterly essential. It’s time to get to work. Forget location, location, location. Now it’s insulation, insulation, insulation.

Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests

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