Jackson Digney starts renovating a moldy double-brick house in Stirling by testing its airtightness: 16.9 air changes per hour, well above the target of 7. He'll install floor insulation to stop condensation, replace windows and doors, add ceiling insulation, and swap the tiled roof for iron to eliminate summer heat and moisture problems.
One thing a lot of homeowners ask when they call up is, do you do renovations? The answer is yes, we do. We do quite a lot of renovations and additions. The types of renovations and additions that we do are generally ones where the homeowner's moving out, and, and they focus on improving the energy efficiency of the entire house. Hi, it's Jackson Digney. I'm standing here in front of a renovation project that we're about to start in Stirling. This house is an old double brick home, and as part of the renovation works, we're improving the energy efficiency. One of the major problems with this house is that it has mold growing on the junction between the floor in the house and the walls. That mold is caused by cold air coming up through the floors and meeting with the, the warm surface of the internal wall, which results in some condensation forming, and then that provides the perfect breeding ground for mold. So we're going to solve that by installing foam over the top of the timber flooring, which will basically move what's called the dew point down below the floor surface and keep the inside of the house warm so that we don't have any of that air movement occurring. The other things that we're doing with this renovation is we're replacing all of the windows and doors with uPVC double-glazed, We're removing all of the ceilings so that we can put new insulation in and then new ceilings. We're making some modifications to the inside of the house for the bathroom, laundry, kitchen area, and converting the garage into a walk-in robe and ensuite. One of the key things about starting off any renovation project where you're aiming to improve the energy efficiency of the house is to get a baseline of the performance of the house before you start, and the easiest way to do this is with a blower door test. So as you know, we use SUHO for our end-of-build blower door testing. We're one of the only builders that, in Adelaide, that owns their own blower door unit, which enables us to quickly do a pre-build test so that we can get our baseline, and at the end of the build we can demonstrate to our homeowners we've taken the house from this level of performance for airtightness To this level. So yeah, come and check it out. All right, so we have got all of the, the house ready for the test. So we've been around and closed all of the doors and windows, and we've made sure that things that are going to leak a lot of air have been sealed up. So things like the vents that were attached to the ceiling hatch, I've sealed them up. And yeah, we'll give it a whirl, see how it goes. So you can see at the top, that top number is the pressure on the house, and the bottom number is the air change rate that's being achieved. Now if you look carefully, you can see the cobwebs blowing in the breeze. So while we're sucking all this air into the house, So you can see that in this house, there's air coming in, and there's 2 places that that's happening. One is through that vent, and the other one is through these louvers. So louvers are really popular in tropical areas, and, you know, there's an argument to say that they're probably a good thing in tropical areas, but in places like Stirling, not such a great idea. Okay, we've finished the blower door test to set our baseline so that we know what the house was achieving in terms of airtightness before we started. And the results of that are that the house is achieving 16.9 air changes per hour. The national average is 15.3 according to the CSIRO, so it's below average because a bigger air change rate is better. So what our goal for the house is, is to achieve the UK national Standard for housing, which is 7 air changes per hour. So to go from 16.9 to 7, we've got quite a bit of, quite a bit of work to do, but I believe that it's going to be achievable. So there's one extra thing that we're doing on this house that I didn't mention at the beginning, and that is that we're going to change the roof from tiles to iron. So there's 2 main reasons why you change from tiles to iron. The first one is that tiles are quite a large area of thermal mass on top of a house, and during summer, the heat that your tiles take up from the sun during the day is radiated back into your ceiling space overnight, which can have an impact on how well your house cools down in the evening, or it can mean that you have to use your air conditioner for longer to keep the house cool in the afternoons and into the evening. The other reason is that tiles, as they get older, start to take up moisture, and you can see from this photo that these tiles have actually completely lost their ability to stop moisture coming in, and yeah, they're wet on the back. So the thing with tiled roofs is you, you could repaint a tile roof, and that will seal the tiles up again, but you still have the thermal mass problem in summer, and there's considerations if you're using the water off your roof for drinking and bathing and washing clothes and the like. So by changing to an iron roof, it's a bit more of an investment upfront, but the benefits are that you eliminate all of the problems with thermal mass, and you can also assure yourself that the roof won't leak. So stay tuned, follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We're going to We'll keep you really updated with this renovation because it's, uh, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna bring this house back to the 21st century.
