Good detailing – robust detailing as it is known – can offer serious reductions in lost heat, and therefore money, from buildings. Previous tests have proven that one of the major causes of heat escape from buildings is due to poor detailing.

Poor detailing allows heat to travel from the inside of a building to the outside often via poorly designed flashings, gutters, junctions and interfaces. To put this into context, some details, like drip flashings, which run around the entire perimeter of the building at the base of the walls can, if they are not designed and installed with care, act as huge heat conductors, drawing heat from the warm interior and allowing it to be wasted.

By insisting on robust detailing the ‘heat sink’ effect of detailing which allows a direct connection between the inside (the warm side) and the outside (the cold side) of a building can be minimised and in some cases, completely eradicated.

A thermal performance increase of 7.5% can be achieved at no additional cost just by introducing robust detailing to every junction throughout the building envelope. Good detailing like this makes the difference between a good Energy Performance Certificate rating and a poor one.

CA Building Products’ technical team have compiled an extensive library of ‘robust’ details all of which are offered as standard details at no extra cost. To view our robust details please click here.

The animation to the right shows a metal wall construction. At the base of this construction, many companies use a standard drip detail flashing, which runs from the warm interior of the building to the cold exterior. This detail acts as an excellent thermal conductor, drawing the warmth from inside to outside, costing money, and meaning that the buildings heating system has to work harder to replace this lost heat, creating unnecessary CO₂ as it does.

And don’t forget that every metal building has a drip detail of some description around its ENTIRE perimeter. Just watch the red arrows as they trace the heat-loss path across the poorly designed flashing as it conducts heat out of the building.

The next part of the animation shows what happens with the introduction of robust detailing. As it now takes thermal conductivity into account, the result is very different. Here, because the flashing is connected to the cold side of the construction, there is no path for the heat to travel outside, completely eradicating heat loss at this junction as shown by the arrows ‘bouncing’ off the inside of the wall construction.