Retrofit one room at a time: Breatheasy in the Yorkshire Post

We were proud to see Breatheasy, our patent-pending internal wall insulation system, featured in the Yorkshire Post's Property Post on Saturday 8 August 2026.

The piece, by Lizzie Murphy, looked at how older homes can be made warmer and more efficient without the damp problems that often come with the wrong kind of insulation. Here's the story behind the project, and why we think it matters for anyone living in an older solid-walled home.

A 1906 home in Birstwith

The article featured our second Breatheasy installation, at Pete and Emily’s detached four-bedroom house in Birstwith, near Harrogate. The original house dates from 1906, with a modern extension added in 2008.

Pete, Emily and their two young children moved from Headingley in April. It didn't take long to notice that the older part of the house was much colder than the extension. The plot is exposed and wind was finding its way in around the windows and door joints.

Their long-term plan is to make the house as airtight as possible, then move to an air source heat pump and come off gas altogether.

Starting with one bedroom

We began with a Home Energy Action Plan and an airtightness survey. Together they showed where heat was escaping and which improvements would make the biggest difference.

The first stage was one of the children's bedrooms. When the ceiling came down, we found no insulation at all in the walls or the ceiling. The walls are solid stone, so there's no cavity to fill.

Over six working days we:

Insulated the ceiling and external walls with Breatheasy
Improved airtightness around the windows
Sealed the floor junctions

Pete told the Yorkshire Post that seeing the quality of the work in one room convinced the family to carry on improving the rest of the house over the coming years. As Jamie put it in the article, "old buildings need to breathe", and that's exactly what the system is designed for.

Why we switched to hemp

Breatheasy is designed for older solid-walled homes. It uses breathable natural materials, so moisture can move naturally through the wall instead of getting trapped and causing damp and condensation.

Our earlier installs used wood fibre. The latest version uses hemp insulation grown in East Yorkshire and processed in Scotland. Old walls are rarely straight, and hemp copes far better with bends and uneven surfaces.

We've also refined the plaster finish so there's no separate plastering stage. The Birstwith room took six days, but we expect future installs to be done by a two-person team in as little as two to three days.

The system has been developed with Energy Systems Catapult and the University of Birmingham, and won the Big Retrofit Challenge at Futurebuild. On a previous project, 50mm of breathable wood fibre cut heat loss through a typical solid brick wall by around 75%.

Cooler in summer too

With hotter summers becoming more common, we designed Breatheasy to help in warm weather as well as cold. Hemp is dense, so it slows down how quickly heat moves through the wall.

In practice that evens out the temperature between day and night. Open the windows at night to cool the room down, and during the day the insulation helps hold back the heat.