0333 444 1062
Late last week Eco Home Insulation, MSV, Councillor Gavin White, Manchester Cities Council Executive Member for Housing and Development and various other contributors attended the launch of MSV’s (Mosscare St Vincent’s) newly refurbished and retrofitted ‘Cosy Home’ on Cadogan Street in Manchester. The event was set up to reveal the newly refurbished and sustainable home in Manchester that we had the honour of installing Internal Wall Insulation to and to showcase this home to members of the community as an example of how homes can be made more Eco Friendly and Energy Efficient.
MSV are a housing group who own and manage around 9000 homes throughout Greater Manchester, Lancashire, and West Yorkshire. They aim to respond to the housing crisis crippling the Northwest of England by assisting millennials, the elderly, low-income households, people in need of specialist housing, first-time buyers and people looking to ‘right-size’.
MSV “deliver a range of housing solutions to the most overlooked and under-served in society. Our corporate strategy ‘The MSV Way’ commits to investing in People, Planet and Place with capacity for over 1,000 new sustainable homes over the next few years that people can afford, a sustainability plan to play our part in reducing the impact of climate change and investing in communities and neighbourhoods”.
Therefore, we at Eco Home Insulation believe we shared common values and goals in providing consumers with sustainable, renewable, and affordable solutions for their homes and when they came to us asking if we wanted to help with their ‘Cosy Home’ project we jumped at the opportunity.
The house we were fortunate enough to help with was a traditional pre-war brick-built terrace on Cadogan Street in Manchester. These specific types of houses can be found throughout Manchester and are prolifically difficult to retrofit and decarbonise due to them not benefiting from a cavity within their walls like most modern homes. Due to this, these homes can be difficult to heat/maintain the heat however, a superbly effective way to insulate these more traditional types of properties is internally via a solid wall insulation system or ‘internal wall insulation’ (IWI). Plus, with the Government setting out targets for all UK rented homes to meet an EPC rating of C or above by 2030, we needed a clear strategy for how we could help MSV achieve the best EPC rating possible.
Eco Home Insulation decided that to help bring the EPC rating up, Internal Wall Insulation would need to be installed throughout the external walls of the property. Traditional properties are often suffering with what we call “cold wall syndrome” which can be identified with the appearance of mould in habitable rooms as they are notoriously difficult to heat/maintain the heat. Internal Wall Insulation means building our own cavity walls inside the home and filling them with insulating materials to stop the warm air escaping the home and cold air from entering whilst also allowing for effective ventilation.
By having IWI installed to your home, you are effectively putting a coat on your house, helping to preventing cold air from entering and any heat escaping via the masonry walls. Insulating these walls will also dramatically help towards lowering your energy bills as your home will stay warmer for much longer.
Eco Home Insulation are carded and accredited to install the following IWI systems:
- SWIP
- British Gypsum RF & TL
These systems, although different in their design, achieve the same outcome – reduce the thermal conductivity rate of your properties walls (U-value) down to 0.3 transmittance.
A U-value is the time it takes for heat to penetrate through a substrate – the lower the value, the longer it takes for heat to penetrate through. On average, an untreated wall could have a U-value as high as 10 or more.
The insulation that we installed is of a high standard, with the relocation of services such as electrical sockets, switches, skirting boards, windowsills etc. being relocated to the new wall by a qualified engineer. The installation was then finished with plasterboard and high plaster finish in preparation for decoration.
The ‘Cosy Home’ in Cadogan street now benefits from an EPC rating of A – the highest it can be, and the household bills are set to be monitored for the next 2 years to assess the results of the work done and see the effects it has on the home during typical usage over that period.
6 different companies contributed to this renovation project installing Solar PV’s, Air Source Heat Pumps and new windows and doors. The aim of this project is to demonstrate to the community how properties of this nature can be more energy efficient, reduce their CO2 output and be kinder to the environment all whilst lowering consumer energy bills. “Housing accounts for up to 40% of carbon emissions according to the Committee on Climate Change, so we have a significant and important role to play in creating clean, green and thriving communities” (MSV, 2022).
Cllr Gavin White, Manchester City Council’s executive member for housing and development, stated:
“We know that we need to meet the retrofit challenge in our social housing head-on if we are serious about meeting our target to become a zero-carbon city by 2038.
“We have nearly 70,000 social homes in Manchester, and this means the scale of the investment needed to bring these homes up to modern sustainability standards is significant – but it’s a vital piece of work.
“We need pilot programmes like this to explore viable options to invest in low carbon interventions in our older housing stock and crucially during the cost-of-living crisis, help reduce energy bills for our residents.” – (MSV, 2022).
We are extremely proud of the results achieved and work conducted on this ‘Cosy Home’ and look forward to analysing the results in a few years’ time. We hope this encourages more builders, housing groups, landlords, owners, and tenants to make changes towards greener housing and communities. We would also like to thank MSV for the opportunity to work with them on this project and hope the new residents of this ‘Cosy Home’ will be extremely happy.
For any more information on the topic you have read about in this blog please contact us on 0333 444 1062 or via our email info@ecohomeinsulation.co.uk
