Ecological house

[bham]

OK, thank you for these explanations ...
Let's come to a second question: my mom bought an apartment in a building from the 60s for her old age. She wanted to insulate it from the inside, but if it's not interesting, what solution did it in old collective housing?

Hi Bucheron.
ben either mom convinces the trustee to insulate the building from the outside, or she does her personal interior insulation, which means that she will have to limit herself to insulating the exterior walls. I can hardly see insulation on the ground and another on the ceiling, with a ceiling height of 2,50 m. If the ceilings are +, why not. That said, it is necessary to put the heat loss into perspective, in the sense that a square or rectangular apartment very often has a wall facing the outside, more rarely 2 and even more rarely 3 or 4. So the tiles constituting ceiling and floor do not will have, at the level of the apartment, a thermal bridge that on a safe side, 2 maybe but probably not on 3 or 4 sides. By cons if there is a balcony, ouch, ouch, ouch !!!! It will constitute an excellent cold propagator towards the slab / floor or slab / ceiling if the neighbor above also has a balcony !!!!

[jean63]

In an apartment: 1st operations to do =>

- install double glazing on windows and bay windows.

- insulate the ceiling: this can be done by reducing the ceiling height a little.

The percentage of loss from the ceiling is very important. Of course that does not solve the problem of thermal bridges but it is better than nothing.

This is what my parents-in-law did in their large house built in stone in the 60s, and they have reduced their consumption of fuel (and now gas).

[lio74]

Hello,
Here is a survey for my TPE, the result will be included in my TPE.
Goods.

bahhh i don't know what's going on .. i can't vote !!!

I would say like that at random .... 20-25%

some politicards and the HLM guys are trying to do HQE ... so much the better ... but it's mostly a fashion phenomenon !!!

and yes, marketing level: ecology, energy saving, sustainable development are all banal words (banal ??? ) in the language of the media ... just as banal as: bomb attack in iraq, Ségozy and Sarkolène , .... and all the usual horrors heard on the news at 20 p.m. !!!
this joins some words exchanged on the vocabulary of TV with miss océano somewhere on the forum

Sleep good people, all is well! and smile you are filmed!

@+

[Woodcutter]

[...] That said, it is necessary to put the heat loss into perspective, in the sense that a square or rectangular apartment very often has a wall facing the outside, more rarely 2 and even more rarely 3 or 4. So the tiles constituting ceiling and floor will have, at the level of the apartment, a thermal bridge only on a safe side, 2 maybe but probably not on 3 or 4 sides. By cons if there is a balcony, ouch, ouch, ouch !!!! It will constitute an excellent cold propagator towards the slab / floor or slab / ceiling if the neighbor above also has a balcony !!!!

It is an apartment in the 7th (at the top) which is crossing (thin building bar) therefore with two walls on the outside, and a balcony.

What is better to use if you still want to insulate the walls?

[Targol]

Hello,

I join absolutely bham for his excellent explanations on the insulation by the outside by adding however the following point: the thermal inertia of the walls is especially appreciable in summer: it makes it possible to capture the calories of the air of the house when we open the windows.
In my house built in stone walls of +/- 50cm thick without any particular insulation, I managed to obtain fifteen degrees less in the house during a heat wave just by closing (or partially opening) the shutters when the sun is beating .

As for Môman Bucheron's apartment, my advice will be as follows:

• Insulate only the "facades" (in the broad sense, including floor and ceiling) which are in contact with the outside. Thermally speaking, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the advantages of collective housing by isolating yourself from the heat sources of adjoining apartments. Phonically, that's another story.
  This insulation, which is limited to the faces in contact with the outside, makes it possible to continue to benefit from the thermal inertia of the "party faces".
• To insulate the walls, depending on the surface that it is acceptable to lose, various solutions are available: panels of Ba13 lined in pose bonded by studs (avoid the polystyrene lining which is waterproof and prevents the wall from breathing), finishing panels screwed on cleats and behind which we pour loose insulation (cellulose wool for example which has excellent resistance over time and does not fear humidity). In all cases, proscribe thin multi-layer insulators whose performance has been judged poor by CSTB, which pose major problems of condensation due to their tightness and which consume a lot of energy.

In short, if you have more specific questions, Bucheron, I would be happy to answer them. Otherwise, I can only advise you to buy (or borrow from the library, if you find it) the book by JP Oliva "Ecological insulation" (example on Amazon) which is really the bible on this subject.

[bham]

Not much else to say after Targol.
Just specify that all the partitions, internal to the apartment or terraced that are in contact with an exterior wall (or a ceiling in contact with a roof!) Are sources of potential thermal bridge. This means that even by insulating the exterior wall from the inside, these partitions bring cold from the outside inwards for a few centimeters. If they are not load-bearing, we could, by extrapolating, go so far as to cut a space between them and the exterior wall, so that there is no discontinuity in the insulation.
Given the situation of Maman Bucheron's apartment, there is no choice, the ceiling insulation is essential and this is where we would like to have a really efficient thin insulation because there is probably a problem in height under ceiling (HSP), when we know that the standard of insulation in roofing / ceiling under flat roof is 20/25 cm, which brings us the HSP to 2,25m / 2,30m.
So there will be compromises to be made, insulate the ceiling a minimum, insulate the exterior walls from the inside, do not insulate the floor to capture the calories of the neighbor below, knowing that there will be thermal bridges linked to the balcony and exterior walls.
Without forgetting the wind factor which, on the 7th floor, can further increase the losses.
So do what Jean63's parents did, ie limit the losses, knowing that it will never be perfect.

This brings me back to the initial theme of this subject, the ecological house because an ecological house is a well insulated house. We are millions in the case of your mom, Bucheron, trying to isolate somehow an existing habitat, and it is far from simple, for who wants to do a real job of finding information and a real insulation, healthy, effective in winter and summer.
So I believe in the development of the ecological house, thought from the start according to our energy expenditure. Real estate transactions now require a thermal diagnosis and this is just the start. When heating costs even more in the budget, existing uninsulated or poorly insulated housing will no longer be worth a Kopec and it will undoubtedly become less expensive to invest in ecologically constructed housing.

[Targol]

This is all the more true since even today, the price difference between a bioclimatic house and a "subdivision rabbit cage" pays for itself in a very short time (of the order of 5 to 10 years - I n have the exact figures in mind).

The bioclimatic is above all a story of form, positioning of openings and rational parts. Thus, with the same materials as those of "traditional" construction, you can save 70% of energy just by intelligently setting up your house on the ground, by changing the arrangement of rooms and openings and, of course, by insulating from the outside.
If we use the same "traditional" materials as those used in the subdivisions, the house will not be organic but, for almost the same price, it will be bioclimatic.

Come on, I'm continuing my ad for JP Oliva a bit: he wrote another book with another guy called "bioclimatic design" (Link). This second book is a little less perfect than the other (a few typographic dumplings or in the legend of diagrams) but it is still as clear and richly illustrated.

[bham]

Two more things about Maman Bucheron's apartment.
It would be good to know from the trustee if the roof of the building, which must be flat, has been covered with a layer of insulation (thickness?) Before putting the bitumen.
It can be interesting to treat the balcony like a veranda, dressing it with fixed panes up to the top of the railing, for example, and removable panes above, for sunny days. Thus, if the balcony is well oriented, from south-east to south-west, the enclosed glazed space can constitute a temperate airlock as it is warmed by the winter sun and the balcony slab will absorb the few calories available, thereby reducing heat loss. .

[Targol]

(...) It may be interesting to treat the balcony like a veranda, by dressing it with fixed panes up to the top of the railing, for example, and removable panes above, for sunny days. (...)

Excellent suggestion but which unfortunately risks coming up against the trustee's regulations: in most buildings, you are not even allowed to put a satellite dish or a clotheshorse on the balconies, then a veranda ...

[Woodcutter]

Thank you both for all these details, I will pass it on and find out ...