External Wall Insulation – not just a winter warmer!

External Wall Insulation – not just a winter warmer!

Every­one assumes that insu­la­tion is installed to help keep the home warm dur­ing the colder win­ter months.

The actual pur­pose of insu­la­tion is to slow the rate at which the tem­per­a­ture equi­lib­rium is met – that is to say the tem­per­a­ture inside and out­side the home are the same. While unlikely it would ever hap­pen, if you didn’t turn on any heat­ing in a house, even­tu­ally the inside tem­per­a­ture would match the exter­nal tem­per­a­ture – this is when the house would be in equi­lib­rium.

For­tu­nately for all of us it takes time for this to hap­pen, but it does hap­pen – and the big­ger the dif­fer­ence in tem­per­a­tures the quicker it hap­pens. How much quicker does your house feel cold in the win­ter months com­pared to the spring when the heat­ing goes off?

Slowing the rate at which temperature equilibrium is met!

The role of insu­la­tion is to slow the rate at which this tem­per­a­ture equi­lib­rium is met. As you might expect, a thicker layer of insu­la­tion will help slow down this move­ment of heat fur­ther. This means that even if the weather is extremely cold dur­ing the win­ter months, it will take much longer for the warm air in the home to cool down – this is the energy sav­ings we talk about.

The great news, and one that we have recently had high­lighted to us by one of our cus­tomers was the impact of the insu­la­tion dur­ing the recent heat wave we had here in the UK. Obvi­ously 35 degrees is quite nice if you are sat on the beach and have air con­di­tion­ing, but here in the UK we just aren’t ready for those types of tem­per­a­ture. We don’t have air con­di­tion­ing and so forth, so when it gets hot it nor­mally becomes uncom­fort­ably hot in the home, mean­ing dif­fi­culty in get­ting to sleep and other unfor­tu­nate side effects.

Keeping homes cooler during the summer – solid wall insulation!

Our exter­nal wall insu­la­tion works the other way around too – so it slows the rate at which equi­lib­rium is met (remem­ber equi­lib­rium is when the tem­per­a­ture out­side the home and inside the home are the same). This means that even if it is 35 degrees, the house won’t ever get close to that tem­per­a­ture, stay­ing at a much more com­fort­able 20 degrees or so, or what you might expect in a home dur­ing the win­ter months.

So while it is often assumed that solid wall insu­la­tion only works dur­ing the win­ter months, it def­i­nitely has ben­e­fits even in the sum­mer, stop­ping your home from over­heat­ing.

I think it is worth men­tion­ing here that there are a few media reports of insu­la­tion caus­ing over­heat­ing. We have been installing solid wall insu­la­tion for the last decade across Lon­don, and we have never encoun­tered this – gen­uinely, if the writ­ers of these arti­cles had a clue how insu­la­tion worked they might see how absurd their quotes are!

There really has never been a bet­ter time to install solid wall insu­la­tion on your prop­erty, and we here at Be Con­struc­tive are the best peo­ple to do it! We are get­ting more and more work from home­own­ers who have installed solid wall insu­la­tion under the Gov­ern­ment schemes who want us to come and fix works car­ried out by other installers – why we can do this, just come straight to us in the first instance! Our skilled team of installers are the best in the busi­ness, so make sure you choose the num­ber 1 installer of solid wall insu­la­tion com­pany in Lon­don – call Be Con­struc­tive!

If you would like to see some of our pre­vi­ous solid wall insu­la­tion installs, please click on the link below and see some of our port­fo­lio.

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