VIEWPOINT GET THE FABRIC RIGHT
Chris Hemmington-Green, Sales Director of Keystone Lintels talks about meeting the Future Homes Standard.
THE NEW FUTURE Homes Standard will ensure that all new homes built from 2025 will produce 75-80% less carbon emissions than homes delivered under current regulations. To ensure industry is ready to meet the new standards by 2025, new homes will be expected to produce 31% lower carbon emissions from 2021. To meet these targets, it is
essential we are designing and building thermally efficient homes. Energy efficiency is at the heart of the Future Homes Standard (FHS) which means low carbon heating solutions such as heat pumps and an increase in fabric standards to minimse heat loss from windows, walls, floors and roofs. A greater emphasis on the design of a building’s envelope will go some way to meeting decarbonisation targets efficiently. To do this, we must use the best and most suitable materials to create an energy efficient, high performance building fabric. It’s an approach that will enable us to meet and even exceed regulatory performance criteria, whether it is for large scale social housing or a much smaller residential property. Designing thermally-efficient housing will not only reduce CO2 emissions and cut energy costs, the improvement in thermal comfort can also have a positive impact on occupants – adding to their thermal comfort, productivity and wellbeing.
Thermal bridging When taking the fabric-first approach to design to meet these ambitious new regulations, addressing thermal bridges has become increasingly important, as research has shown it can account for up to 30% of heat loss from buildings. A localised area in the thermal envelope of a building, a thermal bridge is where there is increased heat loss compared to the surrounding area. For example, a thermal bridge is created when a lintel spans between the inner and outer leaf of a cavity wall, allowing heat to flow through the path created by the lintel from inside the building to the outside environment. The other concern in terms of thermal bridging is that we are not building consistently what we design, or we are not detailing the right products in the right places. There are also issues with site skills and workmanship; when you fail to build correctly it undermines the good work carried out in the first place. This can lead to a performance gap between as- designed and as-built building performance. It’s why these weak spots can have a significant impact on a building’s heat loss and have a detrimental affect on the overall fabric efficiency of the external wall.
Thermally efficient With lintels having become one of the significant non-repeating thermal bridges in homes, their correct specification can
New homes built from 2025 will produce
75-80% less carbon emissions than homes delivered under current regulations.”
significantly help to meet the ever-increasing building regulation targets. A lintel design which incorporates a thermal break will outperform and be more thermally efficient than a standard lintel. For instance, Hi-therm lintels use a patented combination of glass reinforced polymer and galvanised steel to bond the internal and external walls together by spanning the intervening gap. Up to five times more efficient than a standard cavity wall steel lintel, it offers greater corrosion resistance than stainless steel lintels and has the ability to support loads equal to that of a standard or heavy duty steel lintel.
Specified on many house– builder projects around the UK due to its low cost and improved performance in lowering carbon emissions within the Standard
Assessment Procedure (SAP), the Hi-therm+ lintel has made a significant impact on the thermal efficiency of homes. The Hi-therm Lintel has an impressively low thermal conductivity performance which contributes towards its Psi value of between 0.03 & 0.06 W/m making it the ideal low cost and sustainable solution for specifiers aiming to achieve building regulations with the fabric-first approach.
When you consider that thermal bridges are one of the most significant sources of heat loss in buildings, paying close attention to the details and structural elements such as lintels can have a huge impact on the overall thermal performance of a building. The adoption of a fabric-first approach will ensure it continues to perform as intended both now and in the future and go some way to ensuring UK homes are ready for these regulatory changes and are climate-ready. BMJ
June 2022
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
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