Today, ensuring a building is environmentally friendly is just as important as its overall aesthetic. So, if you have a customer who is conscious about their environmental footprint it’s important to understand how green the products you install are. Or maybe you want to ensure your business is as environmentally friendly as possible. If either of these sound familiar, you might want to read on.
What is the most eco friendly roof window on the UK market today?
That would be our Dakea Ultima Energy. It comes with a triple glazed and krypton filled glazing unit with Low-e coatings ensuring outstanding heat-insulating feature of Uw = 0.99 W/m2K. That might sound like gibberish to someone that doesn’t work with windows day in day out so make sure your customer understands that this window style uses the latest technology and manufacturing methods to ensure minimal heat loss which not only helps the environment but also keeps their energy bills down. It also provides improved noise reduction on both traffic noise and impact noise like rain which is another great selling point.
What do you do with your waste?
If your customer is concerned about any waste you have from installing Dakea roof windows and associated products, you can assure them that our products are packed in recyclable cardboard boxes and all materials of secondary packaging like small plastic bags of screws are also recyclable so there’s minimal impact on the environment on that front.
How green is the Dakea manufacturing processes?
Our production facilities are certified to conform to the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System standard. This means that everything we manufacture follows environmental performance requirements. Our factory also recycles wood waste for central heating and DHW (domestic hot water). 96% of the wood we use comes from sustainable and certified forests. It is either PEFC or FSC certified, with the remainder of the wood coming from controlled sources.
How long is the lifespan of your roof windows? And how can it be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way once it has run its course?
There are two ways we can look at the lifespan of a roof window. First of all, we need to look at the length of time it can function which depends on a number of factors such as the conditions where the window has been installed such as air humidity and frequency of maintenance. From this point of view, the life span of a roof window can be up to 40 years.
On the other hand, we need to consider when roof windows will likely become outdated in terms of their technicality and when a more environmentally friendly model will enter the market, something we call the “technical life span”. For the most environmentally friendly windows, we’d recommend upgrading after 15-20 years.
Once you upgrade or replace your windows, the windows and aluminium flashings can be disposed of in appropriate waste collection points taking into consideration the different components of a roof window-like glass, steel, and aluminium.
How important is a sustainable roof to housebuilders? Are they prepared to pay more for a greener product?
In line with consumer demand, some housebuilders are certainly looking at greener homes, above building regulations. This is down to individual companies and The Future Homes Standard is the government official lead on this and they are reviewing to improve this now.
Does creating a room in the roof make a home more sustainable?
It definitely does! By installing roof windows, the amount of natural light entering a room is significantly higher than installing the same size of dormer windows which in turn decreases the need for artificial light. This not only decreases energy bills but also provides a wealth of health benefits too.
Using a roof window also allows the homeowner to ventilate the property naturally and free of charge which again provides numerous energy-saving and health benefits.
Mhairi McDougall, Country Manager UK and Ireland at Dakea, said: “Energy efficiency is of increasing importance to not just homeowners, but also the companies involved in building homes. That’s why at Dakea we’ve gone to great measures to ensure that the products we manufacture help buildings in limiting their carbon footprint as well as investing in internal practices to ensure our impact on the environment is limited and we’re as sustainable as possible.
“At Dakea, we have 75 years of experience of roof window innovation, design and manufacturing as part of the VKR Group, and ensuring we limit our impact on the environment is top of our agenda.”
If you want to review the energy efficiency credentials of any of our products, you check out the downloadable spec sheets
