Keeping your home warm / heating / energy crisis / insulation etc

Our boiler set off the CO alarm on Friday night. No heating or hot water all weekend. 8°C was the lowest I saw it go on the thermostat this afternoon with ice on the inside of the windows. The boiler man got the gas back on today and we've used 70 kWh to bring it back up to 15°C. Shit me.

Absolutely not, asbestos is a job for professionals. Don’t touch it.

Asbestos was used in the late 1800s.

I have an air con unit that supposedly does both, it is a crap dehumidifier.

What are you telling me for?

It's not me who thinks a dust mask and a can-do attitude is sufficient.

Thanks. We've got a standard system in place. We recently had the CH pump replaced, which they did without draining the system, but resulted in another radiator deciding not to heat up. We've tried balancing the system again & bleeding everything, but to no avail. It feels like there must either be air pockets or sludge holding back performance, so we'll get someone round to have a look and hose through as you suggest.

Have you come across these guys https://www.powderflush.co.uk/ ?

My kitchen is showing some mould and is very wet on the walls. There's no heating, solid brick construction, should I be looking at a dessicant dehumidifier to get it sorted? We're looking at a heater as well but it gets warm when you're cooking in there...

first thing to do is figure out where the moisture is coming from. Drains and gutters working as they should?

Then deal with the mould - you can google it but some form of bleach solution usually fixes it

then you need to the place warm and dry - use a heater for the former and a dehumidifier for the latter. Is the space ventilated? Is there an extractor fan?

Here’s a fun fact. My m8 is a window cleaner. He’s been rejigging his round this week to just do the old terraces with single glazed sashes. His water is freezing on contact with all the triple and newish double glazed windows but no such bother on single glazing.

Dehumidifier may be the ultimate answer, but there maybe cheaper things to try first - try and reduce the amount of boiling pan cooking that youre doing and always use pan lids to keep the steam in. Could also get a cheap window vac and hoover the walls occasionally when theres build-up.

Worth watching this, have posted before but may answer some of your questions and maybe give you some answers.

https://youtu.be/NbtijHKy2Vo

Thanks @gillies @Jameo @Bernhard - no guttering around the kitchen so all good on that front. It's more spots of mould on the walls where the condensation seems to sit. Quite a big cavity under the kitchen as the house is built on a slope that makes it extra cold. We try and keep lids on pans and use the extractor fan (not recirculating so it does leave) as much as possible. Will give that video a watch and have a window vac on order.

can you insulate under the cavity?

very good practical demonstration of the benefits! Must be awful having single glazing at the moment. It was -7c here in Glasgow last night.

If we rip up the laminate we will, plus thinking replacing the laminate underlay with that Super Gold stuff.

do you have pipes underneath the floor? Worth insulating them if you can - as temps likely to be even lower under the floor after you insulate that space from the warmer kitchen area above

Cheers for the various thoughts on my place.

I got a little electric heater the other day to try and warm it up without ending up bankrupt and have been pondering what that suggests.

Turned it on in the living room yesterday morning and it got the living room up 6 degrees from 14 to 20 in about 90 minutes (my central heating hasn't been able to get it to that temperature). Turning it off though and the temperature drops pretty quickly, back down to 14 in about two and a half hours and continues below that.

Issue seems twofold, with central heating not able to heat the rooms and rooms losing too much heat (although I imagine solving the second problem would help to fix the first).

Not sure how external insulation would work on the end wall. The other side of the wall is the pavement so don't know whether I would be able to go over any further (or how thick external insulation is).

Temperature in the loft seems to remain fairly uninfluenced by whether the heating is on so I don't think I'm losing too much heat there. My double glazing is pretty shonky so may be an issue there.

Undecided whether to get a thermal camera and try and work out what is going on myself or trying to get someone in. I've contacted a few companies but I suspect everyone probably wants this doing at the moment.

Where are you based? I have access to a thermal camera.

That is showing you lost 4 degrees in the first hour which I find terrible, was the door open to the rest of an unheated house?

I assume the boiler pipes run underneath the kitchen so will have to contend with them as well. I was hoping for an easy fix haha!

I'm N15, would be interested if that's a possible.

@greentricky Door and windows shut. It's a typical end of terrace with high ceilings, bay window (double glazed), open chimney (that is capped in the loft) and big external side wall that I assume has minimal insulation.

Sorry, I am in Bristol.

If you’re in Bristol, could I borrow the thermal gun? I’m having new front windows (double glazed) this week and have mostly tapped up the doors, so it would be super useful to identify where else we have gapping heat gaps…

Oh man, if anyone has a thermal gun in SE then hit me up…

I'll pm you