Making homes more energy efficient through insulation and air tightness can make them more comfortable while also cutting carbon and bills. However, traditional solid-walled buildings present unique challenges. 

In this webinar from Loco Home, Retrofit Coordinator Lisa Pasquale gives a detailed presentation on how she retrofitted her own property to achieve superior comfort on a modest budget with appropriate insulation materials and careful draught-proofing. 

Lisa lives in a blonde sandstone tenement ground-floor flat in the southside of Glasgow. She has worked in the construction and retrofit industry for many years, practicing architectural design in London, Boston, and Shanghai, and was also the first woman qualified as a Retrofit Coordinator in the UK. Using her professional background and knowledge of retrofit, Lisa undertook the challenge of upgrading her own flat to increase its comfort levels and reduce her energy bills. 

Watch the webinar to learn about the methods and approaches that Lisa used, including the types of insulation she added, how she draught-proofed her flat, and the improvements she made to her windows. Lisa also covers some of the physics of heat and what happens to heat in our homes, and how this informed her retrofit strategy. The webinar ends with a Q&A, in which Lisa answers questions from the audience. 

Webinar timestamps

00:00 Introduction 

03:01 Who are Loco Home? 

05:06 Introducing Lisa Pasquale 

07:03 Key stats of Lisa’s flat 

07:36 Retrofit objectives 

09:08 Fabric retrofit methods 

10:27 What is ‘comfort’? 

11:11 Types of heat/warmth 

13:01 Sources of discomfort in a tenement and solutions 

13:34 How heat loss works 

14:58 Retrofit low-e window film 

16:23 Tackling draughts 

18:30 Vapour control in the bathroom 

19:42 Joinery around windows 

21:06 Warmth and insulation: considerations 

22:25 Vapour permeability of different insulations 

24:45 Floor insulation 

28:00 Internal wall insulation (bathroom) 

34:33 But, did it all work? 

37:00 Q&A 

37:39 Is underfloor insulation a help or a hindrance if you’re not in a ground floor flat? 

39:16 Should traditional buildings be left as they are? 

41:35 Quick wins and cheapest successes for retrofitting? 

45:23 How affordable is this as a DIY project? 

47:28 How to find out if your modern windows have low-e film if you didn’t install them? 

49:25 How do you decide which energy saving things to do first? Can you use thermal imaging? 

52:23 How can these lessons be transferred into social housing? 

55:54 Would you recommend spray foam insulation? 

57:18 Outro