Crawfordsburn Diary Entry No.9 - Thermal Block Installation

This week saw further progress on site as Kevin and his team start to lay the thermal blocks which will support the passive house walls.  

The product utilised for this construction is Foamglas® Perinsul.  Foamglas® Perinsul is a very high density speciality product used to eliminate structural thermal bridging. All sides are bitumen coated. The upper and the lower surface of the insulation are additionally coated with glass reinforced fleece.

The Foamglas®  Perinsul is available in various sizes ranging from 65 x 100mm right up to 100 x 215mm. After checking our details through the Therm software we could accurately establish what thickness of thermal block we required and where it should be located.

For this project we used one row of Foamglas® Perinsul (100x215mm) for the outer perimeter walls and two rows of 100x100mm for the internal walls. The perimeter walls have already been specified with additional 60mm edge insulation, reducing both the requirement for thermal block application and the thermal bridging effect.

The difference in one row of Foamglas® Perinsul to the perimeter and two rows is very minimal. You can see in the images below taken from the Therm software the two different options, a difference is barely visible.

Thermal analysis of floor wall junction - One row of Foamglas® Perinsul

Thermal analysis of floor wall junction Two row of Foamglas® Perinsul

The next diary entry will focus on the ground floor construction, we will discuss the materiality and assembly as the ground floor structure appears on site.