Original subtitles

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I'm Ciaran 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.

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Today, I'm on my way to Dublin to meet with Cillian McNeill

and Rachel Meehan, who are getting ready to carry out

a full retrofit on their 1970s mid-terrace house in Donaghmede.

Their aim is to improve their home from a chilly BER of E1

to a snug and warm A rating.

This is going to be a challenge for the couple who have been living

here since 2023, but haven't done any major work

in the place since they moved in.

A lot of the heating system, insulation, hasn't been upgraded,

and that's just made things significantly colder

than they need to be.

So through the winters, it's been difficult keeping warm.

We have blankets on ourselves trying to keep warm.

Sitting in the sitting room, we can see your breath

in the evenings sometimes, so that's not great. No.

Initially, I thought the best way to go about it was just to replace

things out myself or hire out some tradesmen.

And over time, it started to feel like it was

going to become an all or nothing situation.

So then the stage was research what that might mean.

Now I have an electric car,

so I was familiar with the grants that they were offering for that.

So that led to this journey.

Our dream house, for starts, it's nice and warm.

We don't have to worry about insulation.

We have everything fully electric as well.

Make it more of a green house.

More of a green house as well, yeah.

We've always taken a very green approach to things.

We are big into the of renewables.

Currently, yes, it's the oil that we have,

but hopefully when that's done, we're not going to rely on things

like gas or oil and rely wholly on solar

or cheap nightly rates that we can get off the grid.

Imagining another winter in the house the way it is,

is not great, no.

Rachel and Cillian's home is part of a classic 1970s housing estate,

and I can see there's a lot to be done

to bring it into the 21st century.

On the upside, terraced homes of this vintage

tend to be very well built with solid partition walls on each side.

The downside, back when these houses were constructed,

insulation wasn't seen as a big priority.

I've got to close the door, keep the heat in.

I'm sure you can feel it even walking in.

It's not like there's much of a difference between

the outside and the inside.

You're looking for a total transformation, so.

Yeah. Okay, so this is the blank canvas.

Do you want to show me around? Yeah, please.

Come on.

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So this is our dining room.

We spend most of our time either in here or in the sitting room.

So how is this room going to change now? What's the plan in here?

We're looking to get a heat pump installed,

and there's a possibility we might need to upgrade

the plumbing system.

And I see you have a suspended floor here.

Is there any work happening with the floor or such?

No, we're not doing anything with the floor at well.

Well, that's great because a lot of people,

when they consider a deep retrofit,

they assume you have to hack up all the floors, which is really invasive,

but you're getting your A1 rating without having to touch the floors.

(Both) Yep.

This is a lovely room.

It's beautifully finished.

I hope they're not going to take this apart and rebuild it, are they?

No, the hope would be that we just get the front window done as

they're coming and going with things like

the insulation and whatnot.

But you're having external insulation? Yeah.

The huge benefit of external insulation is, yes,

it is the most expensive way of insulating a house,

but it is the best.

The other thing is because you're mid-terrace, you only You have

to do the front and the back because the two side walls are

considered warm because they're between your house, which is warm,

and your neighbour's house, which is warm,

so they don't have to be insulated.

< I want to have a look upstairs,

and I'm very surprised to discover that as we go up,

the temperature goes down.

This is our bedroom.

I think you can tell, as soon as you walk in,

the difference in temperature.

This is one of the colder rooms in the house?

Probably the coldest room in the house, actually. Is it?

And normally, the first floor of most houses is usually

warmer because of all your insulation in the attic.

Is there any insulation in the attic?

No, there's nothing in the attic at all.

The good news is you have quilt insulation going up into the attic.

That's going to make a phenomenal difference because warm air rises

from your ground floor to your first floor,

from your first floor to your attic.

So trapping that and keeping it in your first floor

will make an immense difference.

As a bathroom, what's the moisture like?

If you're going to take a shower, the window has to be open.

If you leave it closed, you're turning this into a sauna.

I Now, we know you're getting a demand control ventilation unit

that will mechanically extract the steam from this room

and expel it through a centralised duct.

It's time to figure out what a steam-free future for Rachel

and Cillian will cost, and I have the numbers right here.

The couple are using the services of a one-stop shop contractor

to help them with the retrofit.

The contractor will carry out all of the work involved

and will also help with the official paperwork they need.

So the total cost of your retrofit works

before the grants is just under 80,000, 79,820.

The total cost of retrofit work after the grants is 55,768.

That's a big drop.

It's pretty much what swayed us to go towards this in the first place.

We could have sat here and piecemealed it all out,

tried to get the best possible price.

And yeah, maybe we could have hit a number similar to this,

but the amount of time and investment that would have

taken on our part to do it, this is one thing,

one set of grants, everything taken care of for us.

It's hard to argue against value like that.

For once, you'll be looking forward to winter coming.

(Laughter) Test everything.

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Retrofitting a mid-terrace house presents a lot of unique challenges.

With no gable windows, there's no natural airflow

or light coming in from the sides,

and no rear access means that every tool,

material, or tradesperson has to come through the front door.

It only takes one delay to throw a job like this

completely off course.

But if everything stays on track,

this cold, outdated house will be transformed into something brand new.

Rachel and Cillian have a lot of work ahead of them,

and they want to be fully prepared.

They've arranged to have a pre-work air tightness test carried out

so they can discover just how draughty their chilly home is.

Today, we're getting the air tightness test done

just before any of the work starts.

Just get an idea of what we're dealing with right now,

how the windows are, how any of the draughts are,

but it's going to come back quite airy, I would say.

An air tightness test is just a test to see

how draughty your house is.

That would give us a number.

To put the number into perspective, a new build has to be five.

So the lower the number, the better.

So this house, expected to probably come in the region of 10

because it's an older house.

So the reason we're doing the test is to find out

if there's any easy to fix air leaks.

We're going to turn the fan on, it will really emphasise any leaks.

So if there's a draught coming somewhere with the fan running,

it will stick out.

There'll be a huge draught there.

So what we're doing now is sucking air out of the building

with the fan. So that's depressurising it.

So that means anywhere there's a leak, it's going to be revved up.

It's going to be like a leaf blower blowing out through it.

So it really emphasises where it leaks there.

It's like we're in a bouncy castle at the minute.

I'd be pretty optimistic.

It is a mid-terrace house, but it's concrete hollow block.

Half of Dublin is built on concrete hollow block,

and it's generally quite draughty.

So we're going to walk around the house now,

wear our smoke pen, put our detective's cap on,

and see can we find some leaks.

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This is what happens when you don't put air-tight hoods

in the spotlight, the air is just flying through.

That's a huge source of your draughts.

So right next to it, we have the hot press,

and the hot press has a huge leak.

So here we have a huge hole in your attic.

So there's no point renovating your house, putting a heat pump in,

insulating it, and leaving a hole like that

for all your heat to get out.

It's one thing to live in a house and feel the cold,

but having that visualised for you and confirmed, it's surprising.

So with the result of your pre-work's air test,

a new house has to be five.

So this house I'd expect it to come in around 10 or worse,

but it's surprisingly been at 7.8,

so it's a bit better than expected.

Oh, I mean, that's good to hear.

I suppose it means that

whatever work we can do now is

definitely going to bring that number as close to five as it can.

So you can have light fittings, your trap door,

your hot press is always one.

Guys come and put pipes through the attic, leave a huge hole,

your fuse board is another one.

It's all very easy stuff to fix.

So you can make a house very air tight,

and it requires a lot of work,

but you can get most of the way there

by doing very simple jobs,

which is what we're going to do here for Cillian's house.

With the results from the air tightness test in the back pocket,

work can be in in earnest on the house.

First up is the replacing of the old single-glazed windows

with the new triple-glazed,

and project manager Martin is on site to make sure it all goes to plan.

Windows and doors are extremely important because

they're stage one.

This is the new type of door that we would install with all

of our retrofit houses.

Now, it's a composite door, but very good for air tightness,

a lot of draught seals on it.

Very good for keeping in heat and keeping out

any of your breezes or cold.

The windows for this house is totally unique to the project,

and it's a very vital part to get right.

If they don't fit, they really hold up the rest of the project.

This is the room I work from home in.

The current windows are quite old, small openings,

a bit harder to actually manage and open up.

So the new window will open a lot more light into the room,

and the new ones will be A-rated, so it'll be triple-glazed units.

Even this one, the hinges on it are starting to rot.

You can see there, the screws are letting in in the end.

So to service your windows should be done every six months.

A bit of WD should be applied into the hinge here and here,

just to allow the window to be more easy to access.

Working on camera a lot,

so being in a dark and dingy room doesn't exactly look well for me.

It's fantastic to finally get something a little bit more modern.

Triple glazed window,

it cuts down a lot of even road traffic noise,

but particularly in these areas here,

where you have lots of planes flying over and back,

it's very good. So the like of this window is a triple glazed window,

it has huge benefits for a house like this close to the airport

because as you can quite clearly hear,

with the windows slightly tilted,

you can hear the roar of the plane.

Now, if you were to close it out,

it simply deadens the noise completely, almost.

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That looks fabulous, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah.

You like it? Oh, I love it.

Really love it, yeah. It's perfect.

Stage two will take care of everything in one go,

which will be the external installation.

It'll be the heat pump, the new radiator system,

attic installation, ventilation.

So the important stage is to get the windows and doors out of the way,

and now it gives us a clean run to go through it to rest.

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Today, I'm on my way back to Donaghmede

in Dublin to catch up with Cillian and Rachel.

They are carrying out a full retrofit on their 1970s mid-terrace house,

which they moved into in 2023.

Since my last visit,

the work has been charging ahead at a blistering pace,

and it's great to discover that changes to the front of the house

are not just cosmetic.

I see you've new windows installed. They're fantastic.

You can already feel the difference in terms of the heat

and the sound as well.

Can't hear anything out here. Super.

Will you show me around? Yeah, of course.

Great. Thank you.

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You took the wall down. We did indeed.

Managed to find some space in the budget to get it done,

and I think it was well worth doing.

It must have been an amazing moment when you walked in

seeing it done, was it?

So the light coming into the room was just fantastic,

and the space we're getting, it's unreal.

It's all very well having great insulation from the new windows,

but one of the big issues with this house

is the lack of any proper insulation in the attic.

There's an awful lot of work has been done up here.

When we would have came up and actually surveyed this attic,

we would have seen that insulation was quite poor.

It probably would have started off at 150 millimetre,

it's now reduced to 50 millimetres.

So this is what it would have reduced itself

to over the last number of years.

It's literally like a carpet.

This is an issue you'd often come across, I guess, in older houses,

but definitely for anyone,

it's worth checking their insulation level in the attic.

Insulation is a very cheap thing to do.

But has a huge impact for heat loss, for everything,

and it's not a big expense in anybody's home.

So even when you compare it, like if the new wall,

which is even under the walkway,

so we have 300 mill of wall compressed

under the walkway for a little bit of storage.

It's much, much, much superior in its look.

The ventilation system is next to be installed here in Donaghmede,

but I'll lead them to it as I'm on the road to Cavan

to check out a next-level ventilation system.

It's part of the retrofit of a family bungalow

which has been transformed into what's known as a passive house.

Barry, thanks for inviting me down

to have a look at your wonderfully efficient house.

Thank you. You're very welcome.

It's a 1970s bungalow that we've retrofitted

to the full It's a real passive house standard.

Tell me, what are the key features of a passive house?

Number one, you're insulating the floors, the walls,

and the roof to really good levels.

Then you're dealing with thermal bridging.

And in our case, in our house,

we were able to externally insulate

And that deals with an awful lot of the thermal bridging.

Then the third principle is triple-glazed windows.

We did careful consideration about the orientations here,

and we went for a really high-quality window.

And then that brings it to four and five,

and they really go hand-to-hand.

You're making the building as air tight as you can

so that you mechanically ventilate it.

You're able to adjust the temperature

and you're able to breathe good, clean, healthy air. Right.

Well, you certainly set the scene.

Will you show me inside? Yeah, come on ahead.

Great. Super. No problem.

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This is a total surprise and not what you'd expect coming

into the bungalow from the outside. Thank you, Ciaran.

This was something we were really trying to achieve

in the design of the house was to have a wow factor

and one that surprises people.

Tell me a little bit about the design and building work here.

We lived in it for a number of years.

We decided to retrofit, and in 2022, we took the plunge.

It took a year, a long year for me and my wife,

but the real thing was to do as best we could

based on today's standards.

And the best standard that was sitting there was

passive house for us.

The overall build cost in terms of investment into

the existing bungalow worked out at a little over 300,000 euro.

We're saving conservatively 2,500 a year with a 27,

28 year mortgage period.

That's going to run into a a good 50,000,

60,000 over the lifespan of our mortgage.

Our mechanical heat recovery ventilation unit

services the whole house,

pulling in nice, clean, fresh air, filtering it,

and at the very same time,

it's pulling the air from exhaust rooms in the house.

The outgoing air heats the incoming air.

That means that you're not losing all the energy

that you paid to heat in the air in the house.

We've had it in for two years.

We change the filters are roughly every six months,

and it's been brilliant.

We're up here in the children's bedroom,

and you can see here,

just because they have a wall vent here and the air is coming out,

we can just see the impact of good indoor air quality,

and we can see how the system...

Maybe it's another illustration of how well the system works.

In a house that doesn't have active mechanical ventilation,

that air just isn't moving at all, we're talking about.

Correct and right.

You can't but not have good measurable indoor air quality,

and that's one of the things

that me and my wife were looking to have

for just us and the children in the house.

A healthy, comfortable, high-performing home.

Back in Dublin, the retrofit of this

1970s house in a Donaghmede estate is entering its final stages.

As part of the retrofit, Cillian and Rachel have taken

the opportunity to knock walls and put in bigger sliding doors.

The external insulation has been applied

and the new windows have gone in.

Today, project manager Martin is overseeing the installation

of a part of the heat pump system in the old hot press.

So this is the new cylinder.

We're just bringing it up now at the minute

to install it into the hot press. It's pretty tight.

Sometimes they don't fit into the hot press location.

So what we would have to do sometimes is adjust the back

of a a wall to make it slightly deeper to fit the unit in.

We could take the doors off and build this out,

but if we can get away without changing the look of the place,

it's always better to leave it the same as you get it.

Retrofit, you come up against all various different things.

So it's not new builds.

If you're doing a new build, you design bigger hot presses,

bigger wardrobes to allow these bigger your items to fit into it.

You just adapt to suit each circumstance different.

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That's fun.

It's been a long road for Cillian and Rachel.

Thankfully, they didn't have to dig up their floors, but nonetheless,

it's been a fairly a big project,

which included installing an energy-efficient heat pump,

a new electric car charger, and up-to-date triple-glazed windows.

I'm back for one final visit,

and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all went.

Whoa, what a transformation. Isn't it?

I see you've got the external insulation done,

you've got the brand new windows in.

What's it all been like?

It's like a different house now.

It feels more like our house.

We were able to make the changes we wanted make,

set it up for what we hoped to be a very long time.

And how long did the whole process take? Three months.

Did you move out for a spell or did you stay in the house?

No, we were in the house the whole time.

I work in the office primarily, so I wasn't here

during the day-to-day when they were doing stuff.

So more, I'd come home in the evening and see what got done.

Big shock.

Right, so let's get down to brass tacks.

Tell me about the BER.

What was it before and what IS it now?

We were at an E1 when we first started,

and after all the work was completed, we got to A2.

That's a fantastic result, isn't it? You must be delighted.

No, you can feel the difference as soon as you go in

more than anything else.

I don't think we need the letter to tell us. Okay.

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Come on in.

I can spot the difference in temperature already.

This room has totally changed now when you look at the window,

it's so slick and simple.

It's brilliant to see such a dramatic improvement.

It's completely the opposite of what it was before.

We used to sit here just covered in blankets in the evenings.

It would be just freezing in here before.

So it's a really big improvement.

A huge transformation.

The wall coming down here,

it's made a fantastic difference.

It's so much nicer and brighter in here now

between the new big window and the sliding door there.

It's nice and cosy, nice and warm.

The ventilation ensures that it never gets too stuffy.

If you're cooking, it actually takes care of a lot of the smells as well.

I see the windows are generally PVC,

and you went for aluminium for the sliding door,

which costs a fair bit more than the PVC.

Because we got the grant for the doors,

we were able to splurge a little bit

and upgrade it to something a bit more heavy duty.

The difference in this room is incredible.

I'm really happy with how the office turned out for Cillian.

It was dark and it was cold in here,

but now it's just right now and I'm glad.

I see you have the outdoor unit of your heat pump here.

How is that going so far?

You wouldn't even know it was there.

Granted, size-wise, but noise, no.

Much nicer view than the big oil tank in the back of the garden.

Certainly have a greener view anyway, isn't it?

Yeah.

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It's open day at Rachel and Cillian's house in Donaghmede.

They're welcoming family and friends

into their newly heated home.

Good to see you.

It's time to celebrate their A rating

and for their guests to check out all the changes.

I'm really pleased for them because I know ever since they moved in,

they've been planning to do something like this,

so it's great to see that it's finished for them

to have their forever home now.

It looks amazing. There's a lot of work done,

and it's totally different to the last time I saw it.

As Cillian's mum, I'm so proud of them, and both of them.

The heat and the warmth is just amazing when you walk in the door,

so it's really great.

I like it as well.

It's really good.

I'd like to congratulate Cillian and Rachel

on their beautifully turned-out house.

It looks almost brand new from the outside,

and that's thanks to Martin and his team.

So congratulations, and I hope you have many happy years here to come.

(All) Cheers.

The house, comfort-wise, it's a completely different home.

Before, we'd be sitting in the living room

and you'd see your own breath.

You might have to throw on a few blankets,

but now you could walk in short sleeves,

no jackets needed, nothing like that.

Live your life comfortably.

If you're someone who's wondering if it's worth it

or not to do a retrofit,

I would say definitely look into it

because you never know how much of a difference

it could make to your quality life in your house.

It definitely feels more like our house now

after getting all of this work done.

We were able to put in windows in a colour

that we picked out and we got to pick the front door.

It's been great to put our own mark on the house.

Cillian and Rachel's house is a classic 1970s mid-terrace

that wasn't built with energy efficiency in mind

and had become a little bit dated over time.

Retrofitting a home like this comes with its own unique challenges,

from limited access to poor air flow,

but they've come through them all.

The result is a warm, modern,

low-carbon home that turns a house

from the past into a home for the future.

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Subtitling RTÉ 2025.