skirting around ground floor insulation

[Julian Williams]

Hi there

As an RC, I regularly meet with Client resistance to insulating their ground floors, even with heat pump advantages and the obvious drag on energy efficiency. Leaning gently towards John Hait’s PAHS designs, I wonder whether anyone knows of field trials or personal results from adding a vertical insulating buried skirt around a property. Thermally linked to the wall insulation and (wild guess, say) 200mm thick and 1000mm deep, the idea is that the thermally isolated ground mass beneath the building would gradually reach a more amenable temperature for reduced internal heatloss. Clearly, penetrating details like drainage would need resolving and it would likely only apply to standalone buildings. But could something like this work? Or maybe one metre is way too short?

Many thanks for your thoughts – Julian

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