Insulation (Spray Foam) Feature
Efficiency
A holistic approach to heat loss mitigation
Paddy Leighton of Huntsman Building Solutions-Icynene explains why minimising air leakage must go hand in hand with better insulation
B
etter insulation of domestic households is seen as one of the most important ways of reducing carbon emissions and slowing the effects of climate change.
A recent environmental audit select committee report says that 19 million
UK homes are poorly insulated, and that unless urgent action is taken to improve energy efficiency of homes, the UK will fail to meet its climate targets. Unfortunately, as over 60% of our current housing stock was built pre-1960
when little thought was given to heat-loss prevention, the challenge is significant. Overall, roughly 20% of UK carbon emissions are generated through heating,
hot water and cooking in domestic properties. Even more troubling was the fact that in 2017, emissions from buildings actually rose by 1% over those of the previous year.
BASIC PRINCIPLES If we go back to basic principles, heat loss in a building occurs through a combination of four processes: conduction, convection, radiation and mass transfer. The colder the outside temperature, the warmer the inside, and the worse the thermal insulation of the building envelope, the greater the heat loss will be. In the UK, the construction industry focuses primarily on U values –
sometimes referred to as heat transfer coefficients – as a measure of conductive heat loss. These are used to measure how effective elements of a building's fabric are at insulating against heat loss. The lower the U-value of an element of a building's fabric, the more slowly heat is able to transmit through it, and so the better it performs as an insulator. Very broadly, the lower the U-value, the less energy is required to maintain
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