Ireland’s new build housing market is undergoing a radical transformation in energy performance specifications, analysis by Passive House Plus has revealed — with oil heating all but vanishing from use, leaving gas boilers and heat pumps to dominate the heating market.
Quinn Building Products says that a study undertaken by the company’s technical team demonstrates how the developer of a typical A3 rated, semi-detached house can make substantial savings using Quinn products.
Stored energy from electric vehicles (EVs) can be used to power large buildings – creating new possibilities for the future of smart, renewable energy — ground-breaking battery research at the University of Warwick has shown.
The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland has announced a new €5million deep retrofit pilot programme for 2017 projects to upgrade inefficient buildings to an A3 rating or better – with a particular emphasis on ventilation, airtightness, thermal bridging, interstitial condensation and preventing overheating. Grants are available to cover between 50 and 95% of the costs of deep retrofit works for different categories of participants.
The German-Irish Chamber of Commerce hosted a study group to Germany last month to examine the energy efficiency of buildings there.
A delegation of world leaders in sustainable building and energy visited Wexford early on 10 May to discuss plans to locate Ireland’s first nearly zero energy building (nZEB) training centre near Enniscorthy.
Three leading firms operating in the sustainable building and passive house sectors have joined forces to launch Kiss House, a new concept in architect-designed, turnkey housing. Kiss House is available in two-bed, three-bed and four-bed options, all built to the passive house standard.
Blowerproof liquid air-tight membrane has been certified by the British Board of Agrément. Blowerproof has been used widely across Europe for many years as a proven and effective method of achieving high levels of airtightness in many different buildings, and on a wide range of substrates.
Europe’s first purpose-built ‘3D textbook’ building has opened at the Rediscovery Centre in the old boiler house at Ballymun, which recently won the Green Building Award at the 2017 Green Awards.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the Viessmann Group’s new technological research and development centre in Allendorf, Germany on 12 April. The €50 million investment by Viessmann, one of the leading international manufacturers of heating, industrial and refrigeration systems, sets a milestone in interdisciplinary development and innovation, the company said.
On 13 June, in an address about retrofit policy to the joint conference of the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, I suggested that the UK retrofit industry is dangerously incompetent, and that is why we need to implement the Each Home Counts industry review. Little did I know that in less than twenty-four hours those words would come back to haunt me in the most horrific way, writes Dr Peter Rickaby.