Prestige Aluclad supplying passive Viking windows nationwide
Prestige Aluclad is the new brand name in Ireland for Viking Windows, the supplier of passive house and low energy timber and aluminium-clad windows from Estonian manufacturer Viking.
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Munster Joinery publishes first Irish window EPD
Munster Joinery has published the first environmental product declaration (EPD) for a window under the Irish EPD system.
Ecocem gets €22m investment from Bill Gates's climate fund
Irish low carbon cement company Ecocem has announced €22.5 million in equity investment from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures-Europe (BEV-E), venture capital funds that are part Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy coalition, which seeks to accelerate the global drive towards net zero carbon emissions.
Thinking inside the box - Victorian semi retrofitted as a house within a house
Facing the challenge of how to bring a Victorian home with damp old brick walls up to a modern low energy standard, architect Brendan O’Connor deployed an innovative solution: build entirely new and superinsulated timber frame walls within the old structure.
Green Homes Grants: where did it go wrong, and what comes next?
The Green Homes Grant scheme failed because politicians failed to heed more than a decade of lessons about how to do retrofit well, writes Dr Peter Rickaby, and now there will be an even bigger hill to climb.
New England rebel - Cork passive house with Vermont roots
A stunning new passive house in Cork breaks the conventions of passive house form with a design that manages to be both dramatic yet discreet at the same time, inspired by a US project to contort itself beautifully into its steeply sloping site.
On the need for (moisture) balance
Dr Peter Rickaby writes on the varied and complex challenges of retrofitting older buildings.
A precursor to the passive house
In his latest column on the development of passive and solar buildings in the 20th century, Dr Marc O’Riain
looks at what might be considered an early prototype in the development of passive houses: the 1974 Philips
Experimental House.
International - Issue 36
This issue features a passive house ‘plus’ certified three-storey office building in Strasbourg, France.
Is affordable housing a policy blind spot?
Dublin City Council built just 45 social housing units in 2019. In his latest column, Mel Reynolds analyses the state’s surprising reluctance to build its own homes.
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The PH+ guide to overheating
As awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis grows, efforts to kickstart en masse deep energy efficiency interventions are gathering apace. But poorly conceived low energy building efforts can lead to unintended consequences including overheating – a risk that’s bound to grow as the world warms up. Phi Architecture co-founder Claire Jamieson details the risks and offers some solutions on how to create low energy buildings that are comfortable in summer and winter.
Quantifying the greenness of construction products: the rise of environmental product declarations
Climate breakdown and global ecological crises mean that our efforts to make buildings sustainable must go far beyond operational energy use – including number crunching and drastically reducing environmental impacts of building materials. John Cradden reports on progress in the uptake of the building blocks of life cycle analysis of buildings: Environmental Product Declarations.
Evidence base: How air source heat pumps fare in canny retrofits
Air source heat pumps are rapidly becoming one of the dominant technologies in sustainable building, but how well do they perform in real world conditions? Can they be part of the solution to retrofitting homes, given the challenges in making existing homes suitable for low energy heating? A rare monitoring study on a pioneering retrofit scheme offers encouraging signs.
Daikin streamer technology inactivates 99.9% of SARS-CoV-2
New research has confirmed the effectiveness of Daikin’s patented streamer technology, which successfully inactivated more than 99.9 per cent of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, after irradiating the virus for three hours.