Insulation, what it is?

Insulation, what it is?

It is almost impossible you have never heard about the terms “insulation” or “energy efficiency”. Yes, those are actual topics.
You might ask yourself: how it came this subject is so actual? Or, how it appears in the recent decades so often? What is really reason for this? People were using for a centauries almost the same product – houses. Why we are so “radical” in those days with intention to insulate everything?
Well, one thing is certain, people do have the same needs. Yes, through the time we might became a bit spoiled, so our comfort requests became a bit higher. But generally, since, I could say ever, we needed protection for our body. Different clothes, for a different climates were always part of human living. Similar, on the next level, we were using shelter, latter known as house – building with the aim to protect us from all outside impacts.
So, are we talking about insulation as revolution thing? Is it something completely new, which is changing our why of thinking and why of building our houses?
I could say, definitely no. Humans have instinct to protect, to insulate their body, to use correct envelope for their shelter. On the next level it becomes need of the society to protect their members.

Building through the past

Through centuries methods of protecting stayed the same. Houses, half in the ground, or high above the water, proper position, orientation, green roofs, walls from wood, massive bricks, straw & mad.
Now we had moved toward industrial materials and products, somehow, we forget to check insulation properties.
End of XIX and beginning of XX century brought real revolution in the construction: stability and mechanical secure were in the focus of new generation buildings.
However, new materials, with different properties than the traditional, had brought different comfort inside the buildings.
In order to enable comfort, we had to bring a more energy in the houses. We had to develop different systems for enabling acceptable conditions inside the buildings (to provide hitting, cooling etc).
We didn’t thought about energy source, we took it is granted. Once Humanity started to face energy crises, the things start to be changed. As usually, problems brought questions. We started to think about energy sources, about our Mather Earth and how to enable sustainable living and building for ours and future of the coming generations. Strong believes of constant progressing was under the question mark. We had to reconsider our concept. Looking back to the past and the way of how generation before were living is helping.

Need for insulation

Even by looking on a very simple way, we could notice difference between old traditional building materials like wood, mad, bricks and industrial made from concrete, iron or clay blocks.
Enabled by powerful mechanical properties, thickness of the envelope was at the same time decreasing.
New type of material and constructions had brought loss of valuable envelope property – insulation. Our hoses started to be too cold and too hot, our walls couldn’t protect us from the noise or moisture.
When we realized this, we simply had to search and find solution to bring back, and to improve, lost insulation property of our shield, house envelope.
Some positive results gave improving on the constructive products insulation properties. Still this is not enough to meet level of requested protection. Insulation layer composed from insulation materials designed to work together with other construction products, became necessity.

Choosing the insulation

Now we can recognize group of products with the best thermal properties under the name of insulation which we are using in our houses – Stone and glass wool, XPS, EPS, Cork, Wood wool etc.
Those products, beside good thermal properties have lot of other different characteristics, like mechanical, water or fire resistance.
This implicate they do not behave on the same way in a different construction and position in the house envelope.
Simply, on some places on your house you might have big load, like floor. Some parts of the houses have impact of the water like underground or basement. Other parts, like façade need to have good sound insulation as well. Fire protection could be also demand on some part of the insulated construction, so products need to be incombustible.
Carefully chosen right insulation product for the right place in construction is very important to enable right function of your house “shield” and prevent loose of the money in the phase of building as well during the exploitation. This is responsibility of professionals (architects, engineers…) who are designing and building your house.