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External Insulation

More energy is lost through the walls of an ordinary (uninsulated) house than any other part of the house (35%) This surprised me - I thought it would be the roof that was worst! If we wanted to make our house into an ecohouse we needed to do something about this.

As our house was built in the 1920s it has solid walls (seemingly like most of the houses in Oxford) so cavity wall insulation is not an option. The outside walls of the house are rendered and the render was in a pretty bad way meaning we could take the chance to replace the render and insulate the external walls at the same time. Because the house was already rendered, there was no need for planning permission.

The work is being carried out by Oxford EcoBuild

The first stage was to remove the existing render and this took just over 2 days. In fact it was so fast we had to rush out on the second day to take some photos whilst there was still some render left to photograph! It's really interesting to see the house with the red bricks - it looks really nice but it's not at all energy efficient that way!

The next stage will be to repair and seal the brickwork and make good any structural problems before adding the insulation.