Remember when you would enter your grandmother’s house and feel cosy in winter and cool in summer? That’s because houses were built with thicker walls back then, unlike today, with temperature change felt almost immediately in modern households.
Let’s be realistic. A penthouse is a greenhouse in summer and a cold room in winter – so what can be done to change this? Simple insulation will get your household back to the comfort you deserve.
Insulating walls in a house that has already been built is called retrofitting. To start with, the walls may be thermally insulated either externally or internally, and the effect is theoretically the same. To insulate the walls from the inside, one would need to fix an insulating panel composed of a gypsum board coupled with a sheet of expanded polystyrene. Alternatively, the wall may be thermally insulated from the outside, through a method referred to as cappotto. EPS is glued to the outside walls and then plastered with a reinforced net using a special resin/cement plaster, which can then be finished to any colour or texture.
Insulating roofs, which has a greater effect, is preferably done while building the house, by placing the EPS within the roof build-up. However, one may also retrofit an existing roof – from inside or the outside, by gluing insulating tiles (made up of tiles of your choice glued to EPS sheets), and grouting and sealing them using special grouting materials.