Original subtitles

♪ (upbeat music) ♪

I'm Kieran McCarthy,

and I've been working as a building engineer for nearly 30 years.

I get asked all the time, how do I save money on energy costs?

Well, retrofitting is all over the news lately,

and in this series, I'm travelling around Ireland,

checking out homes that are getting energy upgrades.

That dark blue is the coldest.

This is typically what I'd expect to see in an old house.

With prices only going up and the planet under pressure,

more and more people are saving money and energy

in their homes by taking on the retrofit challenge.

I'll be showing you what's actually doable

and what kind of grants are out there to help.

From heat pumps to HVAC,

I'll break down the technical jargon

and make sense of all the retrofit lingo

so it's easy to follow.

You're just bamboozled with all the decisions that need to be made.

So come with me as we retrofit Ireland

and discover how you can reduce your energy costs.

This is Heat My Home.

Today, I'm on my way to Dublin

to meet with Ashley Cortez and his husband, Myles Kenny,

who have been living in this beautiful 19th century

end of terrace house,

which they bought in 2020.

They plan on carrying out a full renovation of their home,

aiming to raise its BER rating from a chilly E1 to a toasty A3,

with the help of an extensive retrofit process.

Due to the age of the property, there's a lot of work to be done,

but Myles has known this since day one.

We've been looking for a property for a couple of years.

Forever.

But we really fell in love with the volume and the space

we had in this place.

We knew when we bought it,

there was a lot of work that needed to be done.

An old building like this,

we knew it would need renovation at some stage.

We were looking for a bit of a project.

Not sure we were looking for as big a project

as this actually turned out to be,

but we were looking for something that kinda do our upper.

The heating system is fine, it'll heat it up.

But once you turn off the heating,

that's it.

It doesn't... We don't...

So basically, the heat needs to be on all the time.

All the external walls are having internal insulation.

We're changing out the gas,

boiler heating system for a air to water heat pump.

We're also getting the attic installation complete.

We're doing a full upgrade of the windows and doors,

and that's pretty much the energy upgrades.

Looking forward to it being finished.

I'm not entirely sure I'm looking forward to...

the middle bit where we have to get in.

But look, it has to be done, so let's get on with it.

To be honest, I can just see myself sticking in

and then just, like, get the work done, and, yeah.

As I approach the house,

I can see straight away that it's in great condition

for a property of its age.

Maintaining the character of a Victorian era building

can be a full-time job and a drain on resources.

So it's great to see Myles and Ashley have really invested in its upkeep.

What an amazing house.

She's a wonderful house.

Old house, I think built in 1860, as far as we can see.

And I suppose the benefit of living in the house

before you start renovating it is that you get to understand

all the ups and downs of the house.

It's south-facing property,

so we get a huge amount of sunlight coming in the windows.

So if we'd launched straight into it,

we probably wouldn't have understood exactly

how big a feature that is of the house.

So we're happy that we took our time and understood the property

before we started any work.

Will you show me around and give me an overview

of what's going to happen inside? For sure, yes.

Come this way. Great.

Wow.

The first thing you're drawn to is the height of the ceiling, isn't it?

Yeah, they're huge. They're about 13 feet.

It's great character straight away.

You're trying to keep as much charm,

but obviously bring the energy efficiency way up. Yes. Yes.

We want to keep this look that entrance hall as it is,

but at the same time warm it up.

Wow.

Another fabulous room with high ceilings

and great views over the locality as well.

What are you doing in this room, now, tell me.

These are external walls, so we need to dry-line.

We need to put the internal wall insulation on all these walls.

Some older homes can lose heat through solid walls,

making them cold, drafty, and expensive to keep warm.

An option is internal wall insulation,

which adds an insulating layer to the inside of exterior walls,

helping keep warmth in and cold out.

It's especially useful in some period properties

where external insulation isn't practical and may not be allowed.

It can improve energy efficiency and reduce heating bills

without changing the home's external appearance or character.

Tell me about the windows.

Do you hear much road noise at the moment,

like during the week with the existing windows?

Yes, it's a busy street, actually.

So from the buses and all the cars.

So it would be great to get these windows fixed up.

This is currently a bedroom. Is it staying a bedroom?

What's your future plan with this room?

No, this will become the living room.

So we'll come in the front door and come straight into this room.

We want to get rid of the fireplace here.

So rather than just keeping it as an open fire itself,

we need to keep the air tightness of a stove unit.

Yeah.

The cost of a wood burning or pellet stove

isn't covered by grants,

but the benefit of a stove is that it's a sealed appliance.

Typically, the air for the fire is drawn from the outside,

so the room heat is not being sucked in by the stove.

They are much more efficient compared to an open fire,

with around 80% of the heat generated

being emitted to the room.

They also reduce heat loss in the house

because eliminating the open chimney reduces warm air escaping.

I've had a good look at the current setup of their home,

and I want to show Myles and Ashley some of the trouble spots

that are causing most of their heat loss.

What I have here is a thermal imaging camera.

It'd be good to see what the house is like

before beginning all this deep range of work.

We can have another look again afterwards.

So you have an external wall here, and it's all freezing.

You can see by the blue there.

So it's all cold bridging,

so you're losing enough of that heat straight out this wall.

When you go down into the fireplace there as well,

See the way it's blue in around the fireplace, particularly.

You've got all draughts and everything else there.

So you've negligible air tightness in the building,

and particularly, you're losing a lot of your heat straight up the chimney.

I know we're dealing with that now in the retrofit,

but you can see here how valuable all this work will be.

I've identified some of the heat loss trouble spots,

and now it's time to sit with the couple

and take a look at what this major renovation is going to cost.

Myles and Ashley have gone for a One Stop Shop provider

who will not only carry out all of the works,

but will also help with the grant application.

Right. Time to look at the thorny issue

of the figures for all this work.

Altogether, all these works are coming into 134,000 euros.

You've grants of 21,500 coming off that,

so your end result is still an eye-watering 112,500 euros.

It's shocking, but it has to be done.

So we're looking forward to this.

You're looking forward to having it all done, I suppose, really,

and enjoying the better quality of the living environment,

I guess, is it? Indeed.

People initially look at this and go,

How long before I get a payback in terms of lower energy bills?

That kind of thing. But I wouldn't discount the value

of just better quality living space and living environment.

I think that's something you really enjoy in the old house

to maintain all the character that we spoke of, particularly, one,

window reveals and ceiling roses and doorways and whatever,

but to have a much nicer living environment inside

and lower energy bills as well.

When you are retrofitting an old building like this,

it's all about balance.

You have to consider all the new features you'll be adding,

all the new insulation, some air tightness membranes,

but you have to consider the old building,

all the old beautiful features.

And of course, these old buildings need to breathe,

so you can't make them too air tight,

but you can dramatically improve these buildings

in terms of energy efficiency and good quality living environment.

♪ (upbeat music) ♪

Before the two contractors arrive to start on the full renovation,

Myles and Ashley have to do some of their own demolition work,

and time is short.

Yeah, our deadline is tomorrow morning.

The contractor is on site tomorrow morning,

so we still have a bit of demo work that we agreed to do up front,

so included the floor coverings, carpets,

removal of all the existing wardrobes,

removal of the existing kitchen.

So we're pretty much there other than one wardrobe,

and we have a floor covering we need to take up in this room.

So it could be a late night tonight before we get wrapped up

and ready for the contractor to start work in the morning.

♪ ♪

The lads have made their demolition deadline

so the contractor can get to work straight away.

And first up is the internal wall insulation.

Myles has popped in to see how it's all coming along so far.

Yeah, it looks good.

It looks like it's quite a quick process.

Once the stud is put up

then the actual application of the mineral wool

seems to be quite quick. So I have no complaints.

The fact that we're a three house terrace

to put an external insulation wrap around the house,

you're gonna change a look at the three house terrace.

Plus we have the volume in this house

that you can afford to lose the 120 mil

that the internal installation requires.

So it was a better job.

The internal installation is going up at a steady pace,

so it's not long before the window contractors

can begin the next step of the retrofit.

But the characteristics of the new windows

have the team facing into a challenging day.

The new windows are to come in one piece and they're huge.

They're like 400 kilos to get some of those larger windows in.

And some of the larger windows are on the top and on the landing.

So to get the windows in,

you need to go up and there's a return on the stairs.

There's now the straight stairs.

But hopefully, they'll get them in and installed without concerns.

Check out. Stop, stop, stop.

Lads, slowly.

More up and up.

Okay, one, two, three.

There are double glazed 6 over 6 sash windows.

Specifically went for double glazed

because we want to maintain the solar gain

from the south-facing orientation of the building.

So if we use triple glaze, we don't get that solar gain.

So we kept it to double glaze,

which gives us the value we need to achieve aerating properly,

but we don't lose the solar gain.

With all hands on deck,

the crew managed to get the windows upstairs and into position.

But there's a problem.

Is that the same all the way across?

Yeah. Is it rotting that side as well?

It's a little better, but this side's really bad.

We had to inspect them all,

and I thought we were given the green light on every one of them.

It looks like that one is not in as good as nick.

Again, it's one of those things that you find

in a 170-year-old house.

There's always gonna be some element that's not 100% correct.

So once it's in and set,

we'll probably look to reinforce that corner

before we complete the final insulation.

Today, I'm back in Dublin to catch up with Ashley Cortez

and his husband, Myles Kenny,

who are in the middle of a full renovation

of their Victorian-era end of terrace house.

Alongside the renovation,

they're carrying out a full retrofit

to bring the house into the 21st century.

Since I last visited,

they've had a huge amount of work done,

but they've also had to handle a big challenge on the glazing front.

Hey, Kieran. Good to see you. Hi. How are you?

Come on in. Thank you very much.

Huge changes already.

Yes, indeed.

You might...

Quite very different from when last time you saw it.

Isn't it just? Yeah.

We have a great view of the windows now with a beautiful day outside.

How did the windows installation go?

It's quite an ordeal because they're installed as a single unit.

It's not like you bring in a frame

and then separate window pieces, it's one unit.

There's a lot of weight in them.

But one particular window, there was a slight issue with the header.

We ended up having to replace that

because it was a timber, the original ones.

So we ended up having to replace that one.

And all the rest of them were fine?

All the rest of them were perfectly fine. Very good.

As general building work continues around the place,

the contractors are preparing to install the new heating arrangement

which will replace the old oil boiler

with an up to date air to water heating system.

This is the outdoor unit, Rory?

Yeah, that's part one of part two.

So the indoor unit is inside there, the cylinder, and the pump as well.

So that's not too far away from the heat pump.

There's only a short run to it.

Which is always good for efficiency. Exactly.

Our intent was to plant up this area.

Is there anything that cannot...

Is there a clearance that must be left in front of the heat pump

or can I plant right up to it?

That's a good question.

So you do want to leave a gap all the way around the heat pump.

So it needs airflow coming through it.

And there have been problems in the past

where people wanted to put fences and things like that

in front of them to block out the view.

We advise not to do that.

So at least 350 mill is what you want to be leaving around it.

And probably a half a meter on the front of it

because a lot of cold air comes out of that.

It's fine for planting and things like that in front of it.

You won't sit in front of it because it will be cool.

But other than that, it's as is.

As you see, you try and leave it like that.

So a couple of Arctic plants in front of it should be fine?

Yeah, exactly.

As the work continues on this domestic project in Dublin 8,

I'm curious to see how retrofitting

can be implemented on an industrial scale.

At the West Park Gym in Tallaght, they're making huge energy savings

thanks to a wide a range of measures they've put in place.

Facilities Manager Kevin Doyle has been leading that transformation.

Kevin, when did energy efficiency first become a big priority

at your health club?

So I suppose about five or six years ago,

we decided to really start looking at energy.

We had a couple of different consultants come in

and do some energy balance studies,

and that led us in the direction

of different energy saving initiatives that we decided to do.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you've done.

Will you show me inside? Yeah, absolutely. Let's go. Great.

Looking forward to showing you.

Right, Kevin, there's an awful lot of plant here.

What's happening here?

This is the hub where everything happens.

Some very innovative things.

We have a chiller unit.

Our gym needs an area that needs to stay really cold, our gym floor,

and our pool area needs to stay really warm.

So this would feed cool air to all our air handling units.

And normally the waste product, the by-product is heat,

and that's normally just put out, so it's exhaust.

But we actually use that now to heat our pool pool air.

Pool air needs to be a degree above the temperature of the water

to stop any heat evaporation.

Your pool, how efficient is this? Tell me how this works.

So this pool is a stainless steel pool.

It's like a giant kitchen sink.

It's one of the few pools in the country like that.

Five years ago, we put in air to water heat pumps,

and the water is heated with heat pumps.

Originally, we would have had four gas boilers in place,

so we were able to get rid of all of those

and put in the two big heat pumps.

So this being insulated on heat pumps,

it's about as efficient as it would get.

The pool would be one of the biggest costs

in a leisure centre like this? Yeah, by far.

The pool was the low-hanging fruit

to try and get some energy-saving initiative in place.

So between the heat pumps and the chiller,

we feel we've taken it as far as we can,

but it's so much cheaper than it was before.

So speaking of costs and cost savings,

what impact have you seen from these energy saving measures?

A lot of the energy saving measures we put in place

had a payback of about four or five years.

And this is on plant that's guaranteed for 20 years.

So basically, at the end of a four or five year period,

it was literally making us free energy at that stage.

As regards percentage-wise,

our electricity came down in around about 40%.

Now, Recently, since we put the solar in,

there's times through the year where we're 100% efficient.

So we're chipping at that all the time,

and hopefully we'll have major savings.

What's great about this fitness centre

is they didn't complicate things.

They looked at where energy is being used, made smart upgrades,

and it's really paid off.

It shows that energy savings

aren't just for factories and tech companies.

With the right approach, even a busy leisure centre

can make big savings,

and that's something a lot of small businesses

could take inspiration from.

Back in Dublin 8, the retrofit works are accelerating to a finish

on Myles & Ashley's mid-19th century end-of-terrace home.

Today, it's time to install one of the final pieces,

helping to ensure a solid thermal seal around the whole house.

We've insulated all the external walls,

so now we need to make sure that the roof is equally insulated.

For a house to go from an E1 to an A3 rating,

the attic needs to have 300 millimetres of insulation

packed into the floor.

Site manager Rory

is taking Myles through the steps involved in the process.

You already had some insulation,

so sometime in the lifespan of the house,

somebody decided to put insulation in the house.

So there's about 100 millimetres there.

So we're gonna leave that in place.

It's still performing. There's no reason to take it out

or dispose of it. Okay.

And what we're gonna do is we're putting in

an extra 200 mil of this stuff, which is Earthwool.

Excellent insulation properties.

We're gonna roll that across the existing insulation up there.

We're also going to insulate any pipework that's up there

because in the wintertime, that attic is gonna be freezing cold.

It's gonna be keeping all the heat into the house.

We don't want any of the pipes to freeze

because if they freeze, they expand and they burst.

So there's little things like that precaution that we take.

And then the very last thing is

we're gonna provide enough ventilation

because now that we've sealed the attic and made it really air tight,

we still want the timbers up there to breathe,

so we're gonna put in vents.

This house, and when it was built,

it wasn't designed to have proper roof ventilation.

So we just need to make sure that we're providing enough ventilation

in this very old structure

that it's gonna last and stand the test of time.

While work continues on the attic insulation,

attention is also focused on another way to keep this house nice and warm,

the old front door is for the chop.

All the windows are in a couple of weeks now at this stage,

and the door was the last portion.

So we've ripped out the existing door and door frame.

It looked like it was like an original door,

but the actual door itself wasn't in good shape.

Probably one of the very last step that's actually kind of a messy job.

So once the door gets in, we patch it all up, seal it all up,

then we can start clean it down and get into the final fix.

Almost seven months ago,

Myles and Ashley's mid-19th century end-of-terrace house

was invaded by an army of builders

in a campaign to increase its chilly E1 BER rating

up to a toasty A3.

Thanks to interior insulation, a heat pump, double-glazed windows,

and a new energy-efficient front door,

they have transformed it without losing much of its character.

Today, I'm back to see the results for myself.

Wow, look at the house.

I'm lost for words.

Yeah, it's coming together, or it has come together.

It took a while to get to here, but it's been worth it, long run.

Actually, how are you at the end of this long journey?

Delighted that it's nearly over.

What's been the toughest part so far?

I suppose it's a lot of us staying up late at night, and I'm working,

and you're doing all the work.

So, um, yeah...

Well, look, you've really set the scene.

Will you show me inside? Of course. Great. Lead the way.

The place looks amazing.

The incredible front door is the first thing you notice.

It's such a lovely, heavy front door as well.

Of course, it's an energy-efficient front door.

A bit of time in deciding the design of the door.

As I said, we need to be energy-efficient,

but the shape of it is a little bit different

from your standard door you would get.

There's a huge transformation in this room.

You have that gorgeous new window

that really sets off the room, doesn't it?

Yeah, this was a bedroom originally,

so we wanted to bring it back in to make it a reception room

or a living room again, and it really stands out as that room.

And these walls here, like this wall over here

and over here, all have that 100 mil of internal wall insulation.

But I'm not feeling any lack of space in this room.

How did you feel when you realised you were losing 100 mil on this wall

and 100 mil on this wall?

Did that take much getting used to?

No, I don't think in the whole scheme of things you really miss it.

We always knew it was plenty of volume in this room anyway.

So if this house couldn't take 100 mil, then nobody would.

(all laugh)

So there's a massive transformation in this room.

The last time I was here, it was still under construction.

But one thing I'm noticing is these amazing tall radiators.

So they're all connected to your air to water system.

Yeah, the heating system allows us to set up different zones.

So individually,

we can set what temperature we want in each of the rooms,

what time the heat pump will turn on or off the heating.

So it's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely no issue.

A lot of people think you have to have under floor heating

with an air to water system, but in your situation,

you fit these statement feature radiators,

which will do the same thing.

The transformation is stunning.

Myles and Ashley's home will have no problem

nailing the target of an A3 rating.

On my first visit, my thermal imaging camera

was setting off all kinds of cold colours.

It'll be interesting to see the readings

now all the work is done.

I know you had a fireplace here, and you've covered all that,

and you've brought insulation over all this wall.

It'll be good to just check it

to make sure there's no cold bridging anyway.

So I mean, dramatic improvement straight away, isn't it?

That looks good. Greens and yellows.

I mean, this is exactly what you want to see,

because you can get a cold bridging

when you're covering over some existing features.

But I mean, this is a dramatic improvement, isn't it?

Yeah. Oh, it's great to see that all the installations are all working.

So, yeah. That's a good relief, right?

Very, very happy.

It's open house in Dublin 8.

Myles and Ashley's friends and family

are here to give this warm home

the once over and hopefully the seal of approval.

You like it? Beautiful, like it!

Oh, we love it.

We'll move into I'm ready tomorrow.

The house is fantastic.

It brings a really nice atmosphere.

Yeah, that's true. Oh, wow.

This is gorgeous.

Really cosy, really gorgeous.

And I'm very jealous it's finished to such a high degree.

There's a big impact with the new windows.

You wouldn't know you're on a busy road here in any way.

Myles and Ashley, congratulations on your beautiful home.

You've done an amazing job.

Your house is amazingly energy-efficient,

but also beautiful to look at, so well done.

(cheering)

We came to this project as both an energy and a upgrade project,

not just one or the other.

So now that we have combined both,

the quality of the house is very different from when we started.

Very happy, but really hands-on to Myles.

He really did all of it. So proud of him.

Aw! Yeah.

Retrofitting a house of this age was always going to be

a monumental task, but Myles and Ashley have pulled it off.

Their home is now warm, efficient, and ready for the future.

This project proves that even our oldest homes

can be upgraded to modern energy standards

without losing too much character.

Subtitles: RTÉ 2025