What is the Kingspan TEK Building System?

Traditional construction methods rely on bricks and blocks. The Kingspan TEK Building System is based on structural insulated panels (SIPs). These panels comprise 112mm of high performance rigid urethane insulation sandwiched between two sheets of Oriented Stand Board (OSB). The panels are 1.22m wide and up to 7.50m long and are very strong.

The panels are joined together using a unique sealed jointing system that minimises the amount of air that can pass through the joints, making your home very airtight. In addition, the design of the panel joints means a more continuous layer of insulation in your walls and roof. In a property constructed using the Kingspan TEK Building System, as little as 4% of the walls and 1% of the roof will be uninsulated. The overall result is a home that is very energy efficient, making it very cheap to run from the point of view of heating costs.

However, your airtight home will need ventilation. We recommend using a mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) system. In short, these systems extract the moist waste air from your home and replace it with fresh air from outside. Integral to these systems is a heat exchanger, which will extract the heat from the outgoing waste air to heat the incoming air. Recovering this heat can provide a large proportion of the heat required to keep a home at comfortable living temperatures.

The combination of an airtight building envelope and a MVHR system can mean that traditional central heating systems, which rely on hot water to heat radiators, can become a thing of the past. You should check with your architect to ensure that your heating system, if required at all, is not oversized and therefore over expensive.

The Kingspan TEK Building System is also very quick to build. The panels can be erected and joined together very quickly and with the application of a breather membrane the System forms a weather tight shell, enabling you to start doing jobs such as plastering at the same time as tiling the roof.

More detailed information is given in the literature for the Kingspan TEK Building System, which is available from the Kingspan Insulation Marketing Department (see Technical Advice).