Getting the insulation right – no half measures!

I have been impressed with the way that the building team has really worked to identify and eliminate ‘cold bridges’ in the system, to ensure a complete thermal envelope. When the wall insulation was fitted, they slid it between the wall and floorboards between the ground and upper floor, so ensuring that the whole height of the external wall was insulated. (No gap between floors). Also, where an internal wall met the external wall, they hacked back the plaster on the internal wall for a couple of feet and added a thin layer of insulation. This reduces the heat loss through the inner wall conducting warmth into the outer wall.

The Refit West report also identified the need to improve the insulation under the ground floor, and since most of this is a raised floor easily accessible via a hatch, it is relatively straightforward and cheap to do. Indeed, this particular measure came out as the most cost effective of all. The utility room is more of an issue, as it is a concrete floor. However, since it isn’t well tiled and is missing a damp membrane underneath, we decided to do it anyway. The only area not being insulated is the kitchen, as it would require removing all the units and pulling up the floorboards. It can wait until the kitchen units are replaced, which is not something we are planning on currently.

The insulation used in building the loft conversion was already pretty good, though if we had been doing it from scratch we would have gone for more. So we looked at where it was easy to improve this, and where it was less easy. We could have gone with additional insulation on all the external facing walls/ roof slopes of the conversion, as we had elsewhere in the house, but the additional effectiveness would not have been worth the cost of the work. However, we have beefed up all conversion walls which are accessible from the remaining loft space, and significantly thickened the standard loft insulation that remains.

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