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

Yeh, I don't use the doors which I guess should be an obvious solution for some of the rooms but I think the main solution would be closing off the open stairs at the bottom and installing a door to them. Also although a terrace/townhouse, the ground floor has an internal garage and one wall is the neighbours internal garage, those walls can be pretty cold to the touch and could be improved. House is from 2005 and has a EPC B but has lots of room for improvement although isn't a forever home so reluctant to throw money at it, which bringing energy efficency up to standard seems to involve.

I'm in my forever home and am reluctant to throw a lot of money at insulation /solar /ASHP as I'll never get much of it back before I croak!

Posted a while back about thermal/FLIR cameras. Loaned one out for the weekend from Library of Things., picked up from Crystal Palace library. Worked out at £22.50 for best part of four days (planning to use for some work stuff too).

Interest to actually see stuff I'd suspected, and the main culprits to prioritise/balance with cost. In my case windows are double-glazed, but there's no thermal bridge on the frames, so the metal frames are essentially radiators for the world. It's got me thinking about specific insulated curtains to baffle the frames, magnet into position, and stop the heat exchange. It also highlighted a few spots I didn't know about, like missing caulk on skirting board/insulated wall which was leaking cold into the living room, and a draught under front door.

Would recommend, but note that the screen shows a constantly shifting temperature gradient across the colours, so you can't compare two pictures like-for-like. Use the temperature gauge as your baseline. It's very easy to get distracted by contrast in the visuals, rather than where you can make the most difference.

2 Attachments

You may be able to turn off auto-scale to stop the shifting ranges. We can on the one we have at work.

Ahhh cool, thanks for that - I couldn’t find anything in the controls/menus earlier, but I’ll take another look. Definitely easier to evaluate a space if it could be on one setting.

Gone full dad mode today and built a cardboard and curtain wall to seperate the stairs from the hall to see what impact it has on keeping the downstairs warmer

We went to a friend's parents house for new year, they live in an old converted barn in rural Wales with an aga, wood burner and central heating that never gets turned on so heat preservation is key. They've got a curtain covering the stairs and it seems to do a good job of keeping the warmth in.

Speaking of curtains. Any recommendations for insulated/thermal curtains and blinds? Are they worthwhile? I'm looking in particular to prevent heat loss through a somewhat drafty, single glazed bay window. The other windows in the house are all double glazed but do with new blinds anyway so if thermal ones make a difference I might as well go for those.

No idea. But on the dad-mode theme I've always wondered about unpicking dunellm curtains and resewint in insulated foil bubble wrap.

We have some of the John Lewis thick blackout type. Obvs. it's hard to compare, but I like to think they do something to insulate the room from the single glazing we have in the lounge.

Yes, definitely! Stopping draughty is one of the most cost effective ways of stopping your room/house cooling down. Don’t have to be fancy, I’d suggest a trip to Dunelm or IKEA and see what they have. I think I picked up some thermal liners (already had curtains) a few years ago from dunelm for £10-15 a set and it’s made the world of difference vs just having single unlined curtains.

IKEA had some nifty honeycomb looking thermal blinds that looked great, but only in fixed lengths and couldn’t be cut so didn’t work for me but they looked fab.

Other option is secondary glazing, especially if the window rarely gets opened might be worthwhile

We had Dunelm insulated curtains across an opening to a shoddy extension with no internal door. 10 degrees difference either side of them.

can 2nd a trip t0 Dunelem esp is there is sale managed to get a pair of thick thermal curtains for 45 quid down from 90, they also had a jumble type section where returns were on the shelf. some of the designs are ok but lots of chintz too

All good info, thanks everyone!

If I remember right it's more important to make sure there's no gaps than the thickness of the curtain.

Current thinking, especially for ASHP operating at low(er) flow temps, is not to zone at all, rather have the entire region inside the thermal envelope be a balanced single zone.

Unless you hermetically seal the zones from each other, the ones set to a lower temp will still be heated by the emitters in the higher-temp zones, causing the flow temp to creep up and the boiler/heat pump to work harder in an attempt to reach a set temperature, exacerbated by the now-reduced flow volume.

Now I know where you got the idea for all that Albion orange pertex! :D

Good to know! Thanks. So for the bay window, is it best to have the curtains down to the floor to avoid draughts? Rather than just covering the windows themselves.

Ooh, interesting...

But does that mean your house basically has to be the same temperature throughout?

Our architects have specced two zones per floor, six in total: living room/kitchen on our ground floor, then a separate zone for each bathroom on the first and second floors.

Made sense to me because I imagine we'll want bathrooms warmer than other spaces and we'll spend more time on the ground floor, but do you think we're doing it wrong?

Like most architects they are - in the nicest possible way - generalists and not experts on heat pump tech.

I think you should be fine as long as they overlap the window a bit. https://www.the-millshop-online.co.uk/blogs/news/thermal-curtains-to-save-on-energy-bills

SUBSCRlBE

That's the Dad-Mode-Mum-Mode super combo.

I’ve told you this like five times!

Go and read / watch all of Heat Geeks

Does anyone have any recommendations for "slim" double glazing. We are likely looking to replace old sash and case windows with double glazing but I want to try and keep the profile/aperture the same, and install something slightly less bulky than the standard double glazing.

https://www.aluminiumtradesupply.co.uk

we had to stick with original Crittall and have secondary but Idid a bit of research on slim profile aluminium, we would have gone with one of 2 UK manufacturers one of them was Aluk the other was either Smart or Origin. they were way cheaper than Reyneres (German)