Kingspan Kooltherm K15 Rainscreen Board has contributed to a top BREEAM rating for a trailblazing primary school in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

The £8.1m Howe Dell School, commissioned by Hertfordshire County Council, designed by Capita Architecture with project and construction managed by Mace is being described as Hertfordshire’s first ‘eco-school’ with a curriculum to match, including an ‘Eco Squad’ of pupils who promote learning about environmental issues enthusiastically across the school.

The school was selected as one of 8 projects in a pilot DfES BREEAM for Schools Initiative, achieving an excellent rating – the only building to do so.

The cladding package value (including Kingspan insulation) was approximately £500,000; and the Carbon Trust gave a grant of £244,000 to Hertfordshire County Council towards the cost of the revolutionary ‘Interseasonal Heat Transfer’ system beneath the playground.

Kingspan Kooltherm K15 Rainscreen Board was specified and installed beneath a pre-fabricated wooden system by BCL Timber Projects.

Nick Barrett from BCL said: “Howe Dell is another landmark Eco project we at BCL have been involved in, and like many of our previous projects, we used Kingspan insulation as part of our pre-fabricated timber cladding system. Kingspan products are often a natural choice given their presence in the market. As expected, the product fulfilled its function within the building and was easy to handle.”

“Being the largest pre-fabricator of timber cladding in the UK we are mostly tasked with providing a complete envelope system, including insulation. We would naturally use Kingspan as its quality and reliability are known within the industry.”

With a thermal conductivity as low as 0.020 W/m.K, Kooltherm K15 will make a huge contribution to minimising the school’s operational energy use.

Kingspan Kooltherm K15 Rainscreen Board is a premium performance insulation board designed for use behind rainscreen cladding systems and is lightweight and easy to handle and install. It is unaffected by air infiltration; and composite foil facings on both sides of the board act as a barrier to moisture penetration, adding to the board’s durability. When correctly applied, Kingspan Kooltherm K15 Rainscreen Board has an indefinite lifespan.

Importantly for a school building, Kingspan Kooltherm K15 Rainscreen Board also performs well in fire tests with negligible smoke obscuration and a Class 0 / Low Risk fire rating.

Howe Dell is the first building in the world to feature Interseasonal Heat Transfer from ICAX, a heating and cooling system that uses the school playground to harvest solar energy.

The building has a raft of eco-features ambitiously designed to achieve amongst other goals the status of ‘zero carbon school’. These include: a sedum roof, a water collection system and a dedicated wind turbine capable of supplying the national grid.