Airtightness is an essential consideration when looking into building, retrofitting or buying a new home.

Creating an airtight home can prevent unintended outside substances and air from entering your home. Preventing cold air from entering during winter, hot air entering during summer months and substances which can provoke allergies during spring/autumn can be achieved through airtightness. Contributing to greater health and thermal comfortability.

Often caused by leaky fabric and openings in places such as bathroom fans, unsealed or poorly sealed doors and windows and gaps in/around insulation, wall penetrations and between building envelope junctions. The passive standard seeks to avoid these cold draughts to save energy and improves occupant comfort.

This requires particular design and care from the construction team. We work with architects and designers to ensure building design is considered draught-free construction. Our high standard of workmanship can ensure that no gap or leakages are missed.

Our ongoing project, Dunstan Palace, is an example of one of our retrofits which greatly exceeded the passive house standard requirements for airtightness value. As a retrofit, these are more difficult in creating airtightness compared to a new home because of the need to work with existing structures. We a proud to say we achieved outstanding results which outperformed what would be needed for a new passive house home. Achieving an air permeability rating of 0.46 @ 50Pa and an air changes per hour of 0.52 @ 50pa. (The lower the score the less air exchanges).

Improving energy efficiency through retrofits can be achieved with the right construction techniques, skills, and knowledge. One effective measure is installing energy-efficient windows. Contact us for more information.

Sources: Your Home, Efficiency Matrix, Ecological Building Systems,   Fu, X., Qian, X., & Wang, L. (2017). Energy Efficiency for Airtightness and Exterior Wall Insulation of Passive Houses in Hot Summer and Cold Winter Zone of China. Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland), 9(7), 1097–. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9071097