What insulation measures for solid walled houses?
I’d be interested to know what kind of insulation measures you are looking at for solid walled houses. There are a range of products on the market, of different levels of effectiveness and cost. Unfortunately, treating this type of wall is much more difficult than injecting insulation into an un-insulated cavity wall. Interior insulation is going to require re-decoration and likely loss of internal area; exterior insulation is highly costly, requires scaffolding and isn’t suitable in conservation areas for example. Southwark Council have been offering reflective radiator panels to council tenants as these can be particularly effective for solid walled properties, but obviously they aren’t going to make the same energy savings or improvements in thermal comfort. I live in a solid walled property myself and it was freezing last week!
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Hi Jessica,
What measures are we looking at for insulating solid-walls? Hmm... well, to be honest, we're only just starting to really sink our teeth into this question! The first thing to say is that we're very eager to work along side the council; to help to implement existing council schemes etc.
Perhaps one of the "low hanging fruit" is to help publicise the fact that insulating solid-walls is possible and that it can significantly reduce heat loss (anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant number of owners of solid-walled properties simply aren't aware that insulating their walls is even an option). If people understand that it's an option then hopefully they'll consider installing insulation the next time they re-decorate.
I'd also like to help residents (and local builders/plasterers) understand the requirements of Part L1b of the building regs. There seems to be very little awareness that the building regs actually require the thermal performance of external solid walls to be upgraded if more than 25% of the wall is modified (e.g. re-plastered) (and if the existing U-value exceeds 0.7). When my girlfriend and I moved into our house 2 years ago, I didn't really understand about solid walls (I assumed all external walls were cavity walls and that we could install cavity insulation at a later date) and we hired a plasterer to re-plaster some of our walls. Had the plasterer said "by the way, before I do your replastering, I should mention that this would be an excellent opportunity to install insulation. You could reduce the heat loss through the walls by a factor of 7 (2.1 Watts per square meter per Kelvin down to 0.3W/m2K). And, strictly speaking, we're obliged by the building regs to improve these walls" we almost certainly would have gone for it. So trying to give local plasterers a little bit of knowledge about insulation would be another job we could attempt (although getting local plasterers to attend an afternoon training workshop could prove tricky!). Educating the plasterers and painter/decorators to recognise solid-walled houses and to offer some basic advice could be highly beneficial because, of course, plasterers spend their life working on properties which are being re-decorated (i.e. properties which are in an ideal state for having internal insulation installed). All the plasterer has to do is recognise solid-walled buildings, offer some basic advice and then recommend a local insulation specialist comes to install the insulation.
One of my main hopes is that we can act as a local support group for DIYers who want to install their own internal insulation. Kind of like a biking club but for insulation! I get the impression that yes, installing internal insulation is tricky (insuring interstitial condensation isn't an issue, minimising cold-bridging, making sure the building regs are satisfied, picking the correct products, making sure the brickwork will be able to breath sufficiently etc) but it's not rocket science and DIYers can do it, although perhaps many need a bit of a push, some friendly advice and some moral support when the job takes 10 times longer than they were planning. So hopefully we can encourage DIYers to give it a go simply by doing things like documenting and publicising local case studies on the web, organising regular meet-ups where people who are planning to insulate can chat to those who have already done it, distributing the EST's excellent best-practice documents, running the occasional training workshop, making little "how-to" videos, organising trips to exemplar installations.
I live in a solid-walled house too and it has been FREEZING! So a large part of my own motivation to focus on solid-wall insulation is purely selfish! Over the next few months, I'm hoping to insulate the wooden floors and walls in our living room and add an electronic room thermostat and zone valve for the radiators and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Although I've been saying this for the last 12 months so it's anyone's guess if I'll actually get round to it before summer!
And Peckham Power have some plans for general energy efficiency (not specific to solid-walls) like Anna's excellent suggestion of teaching people how to make their own secondary glazing panels, distributing draft-proofing materials etc. and we could also help folks to understand what the energy efficiency priorities are in their own homes.
Many thanks,
Jack
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