This winter: seal or no seal?
The arrival of stormy weather coupled with rising energy prices means it’s a good time to check that your home is properly insulated. Here are the main areas the Energy Saving Trust recommends for insulation, with an idea of how much you can save on your bills...
Roof and loft
Insulating the loft or attic is a simple and effective way to reduce heat loss. If access is easy and loft joists are regular, you can use rolls of mineral wool insulation.
This will keep your house warmer but make the roof space above colder, meaning pipes and water tanks in the loft could freeze more easily, so you’ll need to insulate them, too. Roof insulation typically costs between £285 and £395 depending on the size of the house, and fuel bill savings can be between £115 and £215 a year.
Cavity walls
You first need to identify what sort of walls you have. If your home was built after the 1920s, it’s likely to have cavity walls (two walls with a gap in between). Older houses are more likely to have solid walls. You can tell which type of wall your house has by looking at the exterior brickwork: if there is a regular pattern, the house usually has cavity walls; if there’s an alternating pattern, it probably means solid walls. Cavity wall insulation can cost between £330 and £720 to install, and savings on heating bills can be anything from £65 a year for a flat to £250 a year for a detached house.
Solid walls
Solid walls let through twice as much heat as cavity walls, but they can be insulated, either from the inside or outside. Internally, rigid insulation boards are fitted to the wall, or a stud wall is built and filled in with insulation material. External wall insulation costs between £8,000 and £22,000, compared to between £4,000 and £13,000 for internal. Savings can be anything from £115 to £415 annually.
Floors
You can seal the gaps between floors and skirting boards yourself with a DIY store sealant. Older homes are more likely to have suspended timber floors, which can be insulated by lifting the floorboards and laying mineral wool insulation supported by netting between Tanks, pipes and radiators
Lagging water tanks and pipes and insulating behind radiators reduces the amount of heat lost, so you spend less money heating water.
Fitting a hot water cylinder jacket is straightforward. Pipe insulation is simply a foam tube that covers the exposed pipes between the hot water cylinder and boiler. It can be bought from a DIY store and slipped on. Savings vary widely depending on what work is done, but installing a hot water tank jacket on an uninsulated tank, for instance, will cost about £15 and save around £89 a year.
Draught-proofing
One of the cheapest and most effective ways to save energy, and it’s as simple as using sealant to block unwanted gaps around areas including windows and doors, and around pipework leading outside. You could save around £25 per year and, as draught-free homes are comfortable at lower temperatures, you may be able to turn down the heating, cutting down on fuel costs even more.