Looking for ways to be more green?

Have you considered a polished concrete floor? Scott shares the science behind why this is good for the environment.

Just want to give you a tip this week for improving the sustainability of your dwelling and reducing your carbon footprint. So one way to do this, is to install a polished concrete floor into your house. Now it’s going to help you in two ways; it’s going to reduce the embodied carbon. Which is basically the carbon cost of dumping waste material, so if you if you put carpet in your house you’re going to replace that every 12 years or so, which means you’re going to be replacing your carpet seven or eight times over the ninety year design life for the building. So you’ve got polished concrete floor, the whole idea is the floor lasts for the duration of the building. In addition to that, the concrete’s got good thermal mass. By using the concrete, you’re able to moderate internal temperatures, and you’re managing the solar gain to basically control what’s happening inside. So basically, if it’s cold, you let the sunlight in, it heats the concrete and that’s going to help heat the house. If it’s hot, you keep the sunlight out, it keeps the floor cool and then that’s going to keep your house cool. If you’re using concrete, there’s a large amount of heat lost the edge of the slabs, so we would recommend using an edge insulation to your slab. So that you’re not losing heat to the outside elements, which is where you get most of your heat lost on concrete slab. In addition, it wouldn’t be too much extra to insulate between between the ground and the slab. So that’s our tip for this week, basically using a polished concrete floor, which is a beautiful feature for your home, to try and reduce your carbon footprint and and control the heating inside your house. Lucky for us, being that with a bit concrete and we’ve got a really good polisher. We can help you out with that, and we do that in-house. So that’s Scott from Strathclyde. Building your dreams from the ground up. Cheers, bye.

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