External wall insulation Islington

External wall insulation Islington

In late 2015, the Be Con­struc­tive team took on a pretty chal­leng­ing exter­nal wall insu­la­tion project in Isling­ton N1, North Lon­don. The prop­erty was actu­ally a 1950s con­ver­sion from a com­mer­cial build­ing turned into 2 stu­dio flats in the 1980s. The con­struc­tion of the build­ing is 220mm thick solid brick with a rather large flat roof and metal­lic crit­tall win­dows through­out.

Property issues before the insulation

The prop­erty, in par­tic­u­lar the stu­dio upstairs was suf­fer­ing from pen­e­trat­ing damp issues through worn out brick ties on the walls. If you’d like to read more about water ingress and damp, click here. In addi­tional due to the num­ber of exter­nal walls the prop­erty was impos­si­ble to heat, mak­ing it extremely dif­fi­cult to retain any heat. Finally the ren­der­ing and the con­di­tion­ing of the brick was in des­per­ate need of a nice touch to bring it up to stan­dard.

Insulation works carried out

For this prop­erty, we chose the EWI Pro Min­eral Wool Insu­la­tion Sys­tem because of its open vapour prop­er­ties and great acoustics. In the end we chose the 120mm Dual Den­sity Rock­wool fin­ished off with 1.5mm sil­i­cone sil­i­cate ren­der, using the full EWI Pro approved BBA design.

The Rock­wool slabs were stuck to the walls with adhe­sive and mechan­i­cally fixed. The under­coat pre­pared with fibre glass mesh and basecoat – fin­ished off with the 1.5mm ren­der as the top­coat.

Minimising the silicone sealant on the job

Sil­i­cone is usu­ally a builder’s best friend, but in this case we were asked to min­imise the use on this par­tic­u­lar project. This wasn’t a prob­lem at all as we had bril­liant ideas on how we to use other more effec­tive solu­tions.

For exam­ple on the roof – instead of the usual facia boards, we incor­po­rated brand new cop­ing stones to cap off the roof and seal the insu­la­tion at the top to min­imise water pen­e­tra­tion.