"insulation"

It’s a fact that buildings consume two thirds of all the electricity produced in North America and one third of all the energy produced in North America. While it is recognized that adding insulation under the roof surface can reduce cooling and heating costs, there is a diminishing return on the strategy of increasing insulation to conserve energy costs. This is where “cool roofing” can play a role in further reducing the energy consumed, and in minimizing the Heat Island effect created in the big urban cities. Cool roofing relies on sustainable, energy efficient, coated steel products, in a wide variety of finishes, colours, textures and roofing profiles. It conserves energy through its properties of reflectivity and emissivity

The west-facing elevation of The Kensington in Boston, MA, was in close proximity to the property line, prompting the building official to require part of the curtain wall had to meet ASTM E-119/NFPA 251/UL263 for 60 minutes. SAFTI FIRST® supplied SuperLite® II-XL 60 insulated with Solarban 70XL in GPX® Curtain Wall Framing in a continuous span from the seventh to the tenth floors.

A question that homeowners often ask about steel roofing is “Will a steel roof be noisy when it rains?”. We’ve created this fact sheet to help answer that question. Residential steel roofing is available in many shapes and forms. The forming process provides not only strength, but when coupled with high quality build finishes, absorbs and deadens much of the noise. With the home insulation standards of today, you should not notice any difference in noise levels between roofing materials. 

It’s a fact that buildings consume two thirds of all the electricity produced in North America and one third of all the energy produced in North America. While it is recognized that cooling and heating costs can be reduced by adding insulation under the roof surface, there is a diminishing return on the strategy of increasing insulation to conserve energy costs. This is where “cool roofing” can play a role in further reducing the energy consumed, and in minimizing the Heat Island effect created in the big urban cities. Cool roofing relies on the properties of reflectivity and emissivity of the roofing material. Reflectivity Reflectivity is the ability of the roof to reflect solar radiation back into the atmosphere. Its primary measure is solar reflectance - the proportion of the total solar radiation that is reflected back to the atmosphere. Any solar radiation that is not reflected is absorbed into the building envelope, requiring further energy to cool the building; or partially convected into the atmosphere increasing the ambient air temperature in the surrounding environment (Heat Island effect). The measure of reflectivity is the Solar Reflectance Index (SRI) which takes into account the properties of the material as well as the cooling effect of wind passing over the roof. The SRI for a low slope roof will be 0 for standard black (reflectance 0.05, emittance 0.90) and 100 for standard white (reflectance 0.80, emittance 0.90).

We built the world first Passivhaus CPD training facility / pub, this is the worlds most airtight pub at 0.07ach at 50 pa. This is a twin wall timber frame, it’s 450mm wide insulation Huntsman which is made of thousands of recycled plastic bottles. Huntsman also recycled 1 billion plastic bottles from the sea last year. We have a 7.2 KW system solar panels system that powers the building, it’s got MVHR Nilan. On the external façade we applied Passive Purple External which is airtight up to 0.03ach.

Designed by Pritzker prize winning architect Shigeru Ban, the brand new 33,000 sf Aspen Art Museum boasts large exterior glass walls designed to keep the visitors engaged with views of the beautiful Aspen landscape. SAFTI FIRST®’s engineering team provided design assistance and supplied a 2 hour fire resistive curtain wall with SuperLite® II-XL 120 with Starphire Ultra-Clear Glass insulated with Viracon VE13-85 in GPX® Curtain Wall Framing. A woven screen encloses the glass curtain wall to provide shading from direct sunlight.

For BART's Doolittle Maintenance Facility at the new Oakland Airport connector, SAFTI FIRST® provided 60 minute, fire resistive wall openings in the exterior using SuperLite® II-XL 60 insulated with low-e glazing in GPX® Framing with a clear anodized finish. SAFTI FIRST® engineered a connection that allows the structural elements of the GPX® Architectural Series Framing System to support an integral sunshade system, instead of being hung in front of it. The Doolittle Bart Station is one of the first installations of the GPX® Architectural Series System with sunshade connections, which also include SLCC New Instruction and Administrative Building in Salt Lake City, UT.

An old block of apartments in Gt. Yarmouth getting a low carbon Retrofit for a higher, cleaner living standard and reduced energy bills. Passive Purple has been used externally on this huge scale block of apartments. with no margin for error and tricky details throughout, a liquid applied airtight membrane was the only way going forward. The building was being insulated externally and getting a whole new façade from render to aluminium panels. With the residents still inhabiting the building this had to be done quickly and easily with maximum results. Being a liquid applied airtight membrane, any cracks, gaps, and service penetration leaks in the existing building fabric quickly became thing of the past. That and the hundreds of Panel brackets being installed to support the new façade going on, this Retrofit had multiple penetrations and tricky details. Making good of the building fabric and awkward brackets with a near on impenetrable adhesion, Passive Purple made fast work of this great conversion, impossible for any other method. Being in liquid state on application, Passive Purple can be applied onto most/any surface (See data sheets for more information) and will find its way into all the unseeable tiny gaps and cracks all buildings will undoubtably have. Like this old pebble dashed façade, any rough, uneven and awkward areas are no longer an issue, our products simply flow into these areas. We also have the fibre reinforced Passive Purple brush, used on this job to prepare the brackets by filling the larger gaps between that of the bracket and the existing wall and also the large penetrating bolts. A huge win and demonstration of the power of liquid products by Intelligent Membranes.

Buildings consume one-third of all energy and two-thirds of all electricity generated. Cool metal roofs can help reduce energy consumption by lowering cooling loads with their wide array of finishes, designs and colors.Cool metal roofs are energy-efficient. • The roof can have the greatest impact on the energy use of a building. On a typical summer afternoon, a light-colored, more reflective roof that reflects 80 percent of sunlight will stay about 310C (550F) cooler than a darker roof that reflects only 20 percent of sunlight, as reported by the Heat Island Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. • Cool metal roofs are an excellent option for commercial retrofit applications because they can be efficiently installed with above-sheathing ventilation, allowing heat to dissipate through the ridge vent in hot weather while acting as an insulating layer when it is cold. Metal roofs can result in as much as a 30 percent reduction in heat gain through the vented roof. • Metal roofs provide the optimal foundation for photovoltaic installations since the roof can be expected to last longer than the PV system it supports. • Wall and roof solar heat recovery systems can be integrated with steel cladding and used to provide air, water or process heating needs. • Cool metal roofing is available unpainted, with thermosetting coil-applied paint finishes, or with granular-coated surfaces. This family of roofing can achieve solar reflectance of over 70 percent, meeting the EPA Energy Star Roof Products Program performance criteria. • Emittance as high as 90 percent can be achieved for painted and granular-coated metal roofing. • Painted metal roofs retain 95 percent of their initial reflectance and emittance over time. They resist the growth of organic matter and shed dirt more readily than other materials. • Cool metal roofing can help to mitigate the Urban Heat Island Effect because of its high reflectance, which can reduce ambient air temperatures. Cool metal roofs are cost-effective. • Metal roofing has low life-cycle costs, making it the choice of many school, government, commercial, industrial and institutional building owners. • Due to its light weight per unit area, structural savings can be realized in a building when compared with heavier non-metal roofing alternatives. • For re-roofing projects, metal roofing can often be applied over the original roof, saving removal and disposal costs. • Metal roofing is fully recyclable when ultimately removed as part of building renovation or demolition, allowing it to credibly claim both recycled content and 100 percent recyclability by recognized definitions. The product’s recyclability also provides significant savings on construction removal and disposal costs.