2024-01-09 15:30:00
One of the best ways to reduce your energy bill is to better insulate your home. It is with this in mind that the Brussels Region has set up a bonus system to encourage owners to renovate their homes. The goal is clear: obtain a PEB C for the average of buildings in the capital by 2050, by renovating 17,000 homes per year, i.e. increasing the current rate by 1 to 3%. In total, around forty bonuses are available for renovation and energy-saving work.
The regional objective focuses so much on energy issues that the heritage aspect is sometimes neglected. One of the first solutions put forward is to renovate its facade. However, “Brussels has many pre-war buildings, which have architectural and heritage interest,” explains architect Anne Costa who works at Homegrade, the housing advice and support center in Brussels-Capital. “It is out of the question for these homes to insulate their front facades from the outside, which is very pretty.”
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If we don’t do it with a design office, which will for example analyze the composition of the wall, we risk creating more damage than if we don’t insulate.
What to do, insulate from the inside? “Personally, I almost never recommend it. It’s quite a complex operation, there are a lot of technical factors to take into account to avoid all kinds of problems. If we do not do it with a design office, which will for example analyze the composition of the wall, we risk creating more damage than if we do not insulate… even though it is a technique (insulation by inside, Editor’s note) really less effective.” Furthermore, even if it is a minimal effect, insulating from the inside reduces the living space.
In the case where the renovation of the front facade is not possible, the architect prefers to look “where it is easier to insulate”: the roofs, the rear facade “which is often more banal”, the ventilation in the house, possibly the party walls… “There are plenty of ways to make a house comfortable without insulating the front façade.”
Can everyone afford to purchase real estate with a good PEB?
Caution on the PEB label
If the Brussels Region uses the improvement of the PEB certificate to encourage people to do work, the non-profit organization Homegrade is quite cautious regarding the use of this certificate. “The PEB is an identity card for the house. This is a theoretical consumption of the building,” explains Anne Costa. “It’s often much higher than what people actually consume if you look at their energy bill. You can have a comfortable and energy-efficient house without all the walls of the house being insulated. Because we can influence our own consumption behavior.”
The most important thing for Homegrade is, of course, to have less energy-consuming buildings but also “that we still respect the Brussels heritage which is magnificent”.
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