Up to a quarter of all potential heat loss from your home can be attributed towards your walls. This particular type of heat loss is called ‘thermal bridging’ or ‘heat transmission’.
This is the natural process where warm air manufactured in your home travels towards the cold air outside, through your surrounding walls. Warm air will attempt to reach the cold by any means necessary; including via a window, door, roof space, and even your walls!
This is one reason why external wall insulation U values are of such interest amongst our customers and potential clients.
If you’re walls are uninsulated, they will not be very good at preventing this thermal transfer from happening. We are currently experiencing times where energy tariffs and prices are rising almost continually-with no clear end in sight!
For this reason you simply cannot afford to be unnecessarily losing any amount of heat from your home.
You could be metaphorically throwing pennies and pounds through the walls of your home all year round!
So external wall insulation is obviously a wise consideration – but what are the typical external wall insulation U values?
Do You Know What U Values are?
You may hear this phrase and unit of measurement (W/m²K) bandied about quite a bit within the construction industry.
It is a very common measurement, used to measure the insulating efficiency of certain elements within a property.
This provides a slight, but not definite, idea of how effective each element is at preventing heat transmission.
In very broad terms, a low U value indicates high insulating efficiency. So if it has a low number, generally speaking, it is very good at retaining heat.