From the Construct Ireland archives

Sustainable Dundalk housing project designed to prolong the independence of older residents

The advent of central heating improved the comfort of life for countless Irish people over the past century, but as energy efficient building grows, some pioneering homeowners think they can live without it. What’s life like for them?

G rated Limerick semi-d upgraded to A3 with full envelope & heating system upgrade

A typical Irish bungalow built in the early 1990s has been transformed with a green-tinted extension built in the spirit of modernism. Jason Walsh visited Enniskerry, County Wicklow to see how the old and the new were integrated

Conventional wisdom dictates that higher construction costs — for instance to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions — would either squeeze developers’ profit margins or increase house prices. Tom Dunne, Head of DIT’s School of Real Estate and Construction Economics, reveals how misguided this view could be...

For a building to truly be considered a passive house a vast range of criteria need to be met, as Niels Bjergstrom, founder of Zero-Carbon Solutions Ltd reveals.

Landowners & Cement Producers Gain, Homebuyers & Taxpayers Suffer. By Richard Douthwaite

The groundbreaking Gaelscoil an Eiscir Riada, Tullamore, Co. Offaly was the first project to comprehensively draw from the Department of Education & Science’s DART (Design Awareness Research and Technology) programme, delivering a sustainable research project on school design.

Creating the right comfort in buildings for elderly people involves ensuring a warm internal environment, which typically results in high energy consumption. John Hearne visited the new Castle Gardens Retirement Village as it approached completion and found a project that combines complimentary low energy technologies, materials and design to deliver high levels of comfort whilst also keeping running costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions low

In the aftermath of our recent awareness raising, Construct Ireland began to research what measures the Irish government was taking to prepare for the Energy directive, and how this compared with views from other EU member states, an investigation that is revealing startling results. Jeff Colley reports.