Render-Only compared to EWI

Is the ren­der on your home look­ing a lit­tle tired? Well, there has never been a bet­ter time to re-ren­der your home! Tra­di­tion­ally ren­der was a sim­ple sand and cement, which works well how­ever it sim­ply doesn’t last.

The BBA-approved ren­ders we use – known as thin coat ren­ders – are high per­for­mance, multi-coat ren­der sys­tems. The key dif­fer­ence is that they have an addi­tional rein­force­ment layer. This rein­force­ment layer con­sists of a flex­i­ble fibre­glass mesh embed­ded within an adhe­sive. The ben­e­fit of this is that it moves with the build­ing, so the cracks that are com­mon place with the old sand and cement ren­ders don’t form.

The thin coat ren­der, as the name sug­gests, is incred­i­bly thin. A 1mm gran­u­late ren­der should be applied on the wall in a 1mm thick layer – obvi­ously, this is incred­i­bly thin, but again, it gives the ren­der a flex­i­bil­ity allow­ing it to adapt to changes in the build­ing through expan­sion and con­trac­tion (between the dif­fer­ent sea­sons) and also any slightly move­ments.

Don’t be fooled into think­ing that our ren­der sys­tems won’t last, though, because they are flex­i­ble! These sys­tems have been used across Europe in cli­mates far more diverse than we get here and have lasted 30 years or more.

Our most pop­u­lar ren­der is our Sil­i­cone Sil­i­cate sys­tem – this is because it is not only breath­able, but it is also hydropho­bic, mean­ing it repels water so that this sys­tem can be con­sid­ered self-clean­ing. This ren­der is also avail­able in lots of dif­fer­ent gran­u­late sizes to give dif­fer­ent fin­ishes depend­ing on your require­ments – it is avail­able in 1mm, 1.5mm, 2mm and 3mm. The Sil­i­cone Sil­i­cate ren­der is also avail­able in almost a lim­it­less num­ber of colours so you can match it to your favourite foot­ball team or what­ever else takes your fancy.

A new layer of ren­der on your home will bring it to life – help­ing pro­tect the under­ly­ing brick­work and make it look as good as new how­ever if you are look­ing for some­thing a lit­tle bit more than just an aes­thetic improve­ment read on!

External Wall Insulation is the future

Ren­ders are all good and well, but it is the EWI  is where the future lies. EWI has all the fea­tures men­tioned above but with the added ben­e­fit of vastly improved ther­mal effi­ciency of your home. It is almost inevitable you will have expe­ri­enced a cold home – an older house per­haps with sin­gle glazed win­dows and old solid bricks. You may also have been inside a new build, with its brand new highly insu­lated cav­ity walls, triple glaz­ing, and lots of loft insu­la­tion.

Well, EWI brings your house right up to mod­ern energy effi­ciency stan­dards. No longer do you need to live in a cold house! The insu­lated ren­der sys­tems can dra­mat­i­cally improve the ther­mal com­fort of the house. 100m of expanded poly­styrene installed under the ren­der can take the u-value of the wall to less than 0.3w/m2k – that is bet­ter than a brand new wall built today. So not only are you improv­ing the look of your house you will also ben­e­fit from mas­sive energy sav­ings.

How big are the energy savings with EWI?

We get asked exactly how big the energy sav­ings will be, and it is dif­fi­cult to put a fig­ure on it, but we do offer a rel­a­tively sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion to help, which is as fol­lows.

Take your energy bill and divide it by 0.7 – this gives you the ele­ment of your bill asso­ci­ated to gas (rather than elec­tric­ity used for light­ing etc.). Take this fig­ure and mul­ti­ply it by 0.8 – this strips out the hot water ele­ment so leaves the heat­ing.

Divide this fig­ure by two, and that should give you an approx­i­mate energy sav­ing from our insu­lated ren­der sys­tems. To work through an exam­ple – let’s say the energy bill is £1350 a year, which is the aver­age energy bill here in the UK.

So the cal­cu­la­tion is as fol­lows.

• £1350 x 0.7 = £945 (spent on gas – this cal­cu­la­tion strips out elec­tric­ity).
• £945 x 0.8 = £850 (spent on heat­ing – this cal­cu­la­tion strips out hot water).
• £850 / 2 = £425 annual sav­ing from installing insu­lated ren­der.

A yearly sav­ing of £425 sim­ply by adding a layer of insu­la­tion under­neath the ren­der – in our opin­ion well worth it!

Why you should get EWI instead of Render-Only

EWI sys­tems are charged at just 5% VAT while ren­der-only sys­tems are charged at 20%. The increased costs asso­ci­ated with insu­lat­ing at the same time as ren­der­ing are not cov­ered entirely by this 15% VAT sav­ing, but as soon as you cou­ple in the energy sav­ings result­ing from the insu­la­tion, the addi­tional cost of the works in many cases will pay back in just two years. From then on, you ben­e­fit every time you turn your heat­ing on as your home won’t lose heat as quickly.