Technical Briefing – Belfast Met – 9th March
The Belfast Technical Briefing on March 9th at Belfast Metropolitan College, was attended by 21
people excluding speakers. The 3 presentations were very informative and following these the no
pressure Q&A session at the end was found to be very beneficial by the attendees.
Technical Briefing – Architecture Factory, CIT – 10th March
We had 40+ at CIT last evening! We were disappointed that the IEI south failed to circulate the flyer and many local engineering types missed it as a result!
The 3 ‘Marks’ gave an excellent presentation. Marc O’Riain hosted the evening and added a few interesting snippets during the evening as well as discretely giving sight of his excellent new book ‘ The Fundamentals Zero Energy Retrofit”!
Mark Shirley gave a very interesting insight into airtightness, the issues he comes across and how to avoid them. “Airtightness is not achieved by accident but by rigorous attention to detail”
He cautioned expectation during new builds where an air test at n50 of 1 ac @ 50 Pa rarely improves to achieve the sub <0.6 ac/h. Mark clarified the main difference between the n50 (PHPP) and q50 ( DEAP) systems and how the volumes are calculated.
Mark Smith of Cygnum followed and showed the UAE project where they achieved 0.24 ac/h, and went on to give an excellent insight on Timber frame engineering principles, applications, thermal bridge avoidance and some pretty cool design solutions. He also gave an overview of and their 6week old new panel lifting machine which enables Cygnum to manufacture fully closed wall units into the future. The vertical load carrying ability of the 140mm studs was amazing!
We had an interesting QA session and continued the debate from the See the Light conference on the pressure and lack of resources available for delivering projects with reasonable performance expectation. The offsite construction methods discussed and displayed certainly seem one way to address this shortfall.
John Morehead M.R.I.A.I
Wain Morehead Architects Ltd
