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

We’re installing a whole-home centralised system, with supply/exhaust ducts to every room. This relies on the whole house being as airtight as possible, with no trickle vents, in order to keep the system balanced and recover as much heat from the exhaust air as possible.

The system needs speccing and sizing appropriately for the size of your house, and commissioning to suit via adjusting fan flow rates and plenum restriction.

You can get single-room decentralised ‘dMVHR’ units, but they’re nowhere near as effective

No, I'm no expert on cavity walls but I think they were mainly introduced to reduce damp problems. But the other advantages of having the air gap between two walls are inherently better thermal properties (even without insulation), better soundproofing and a handy pre-made space to fill with insulation.

I'm wondering what planning departments are going to do when everyone wants to add 6 inches of foam to every external dimension of their house.

So am I, haha. We got our planning through with no quibbles, which surprised us given we're planning to clad an early Edwardian terrace in cement boards which will really look quite different to anything around us (see attached pics).

My current understanding is that includes an expectation there will be some insulation under the Viroc boards, but for 100mm we might need to specifically get the OK. I need to talk to the architects about that this week.

Given our local authority have declared a climate emergency you think they'd be supportive, right...

2 Attachments

Interesting! I'm keen to follow how you get on.

When my house is mouldy in space-year 2030 I'll post pix for you and @Howard

I reckon you'll be alright but I don't really fully understand MVHR or fully understand all the Changeplan/Ubakus etc. wizardry - I'm getting my head around it at the moment. Although someone on Buildhub said Changeplan puts the dew point in the insulation with IWI even if you spec 5mm of insulation, so hopefully you've got figures from Ubakus/somewhere else too.

There's only so much I can do right now before the point above about planning and EWI is resolved.

This looks great.

2 qs:

1. Does the first floor have cement boards covered in brick slips?
   
2. What age is the house?
   

Flat roof bay though. Surely that's just begging for trouble.

I haven't had working heating since 17th December. It is fucking freezing.

We foolishly removed an old but working oil-fired boiler for a lovely new modern high capacity Viessmann wood pellet system.

Honestly the thing is absolutely shit. Nobody ever switch to biomass. It is simply incapable of heating the house, and while it is built like a tank in the true German style, it is also equipped with the cheapest, shittest and most fragile electronic and moving parts, again in the true German style. It fails all the time and doesn't tell you when it has failed. You just wake up freezing and can't get hot water, then you go into the boiler room and discover it's pretending to have run out of pellets, or forgotten how to make it go on fire, or it thinks the door is open.
Now it has decided this will be its permanent state, and the man from Viessmann has singularly failed to come and bring the replacement parts.

Honestly, fuck the climate crisis, I'd have more warmth if I just burned Greta Thunberg.

We're getting a new kitchen soon and I'm looking at downdraft ventilating induction hobs. I have a subfloor I could vent through, but wondering if connecting that sort of ducting there is just inviting back drafts/cold air into my kitchen?

I'll be doing fairly extensive work to make the subfloor insulated and air-tight and wondering if venting like that is counterproductive...

I believe you can pretty much whack whatever form of conventional insulation in there and not worry about your house getting fucked up...

As I understand it, if you insulate inside a cavity and it changes the behaviour of moisture in the wall, e.g. changing where in the wall is the dewpoint, then it can very much fuck up your cavity wall and thus your house by inducing or accelerating corrosion of cavity wall ties because of the extra moisture.

Another, seperate question on windows.

We are getting some triple glazed units in, with EWI thereafter.

Am I right in saying that the new windows should be installed as close to the current 'edge' as possible? That way the EWI can slightly overlap the window facing and improve thermal performance.

We can get extended cills to account for this but will it expose the windows to more rain than usual, and is that a problem?

@gillies where are you getting your triple glazing from? You're Glasgow right? We're just on the hunt and the amount of sales people saying don't bother its not worth it (which I translate to: we can't source it / can't be bothered to source it with our current supplier) is astounding.

Glasgow yeah - almost certainly going with Nordan. I think the quotes we had from Rationel and one other (can't recall) were a good bit more expensive.

The jump from alu clad timber double glaz to alu clad triple isn't really that much!

Bloke at work went wood pellets a couple of years ago. Had some Archimedes type screw arrangement to deliver the pellets from the hopper to the boiler. This was always going wrong but apparently the tax breaks made all the pain worthwhile...

Not to mention all the shit the biomass pumps out either.

Thinking of fitting an electric radiator next to the front door and pairing it with a front door curtain. Planners didn't let us change the door and so it's just a cold draughty heatsink. There's space on the wall next to it for a colum rad and an unused plug socket. Is this a bad idea?

I would get a good curtain first and see if that makes a difference. We bought a fairly cheap IKEA "thermal" curtain and I just doubled it up (two curtains) on one of the IKEA double poles. It helped loads.

You can defo get better curtains obvs.

EDIT - try and seal the door too to remove the drafts!

Way back when, in our two up - two down with outside toilet we had what looked like large stuffed sausages that went on the floor and blocked off the draft at the bottom of the door curtains. I wonder if they are still a thing?

Draft excluders

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1304920349/draft-excluder-30-motives-designs-all?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=draft+excluder&ref=sc_gallery-1-1&plkey=4c65699a1bc77752b535346edb1f102d816d2655%3A1304920349

bad idea?

What's the concern?

The easiest thing would be to start with the curtain. Then later you can see if the rad is necessary.

The curtain is also less effort to search for as you're not weighing up btu vs aesthetics vs fitting vs etc etc. Just what you like the look of in the right length.

Thanks, I'm looking at a door with a curtain now and I was thinking.

My mum made them herself, mostly had ears, mouth , eyes and small legs to make them look like sausage dogs lol.

Yeah my mum made a courdory(sp?) sausage dog for our freezing basement next to the coal celler door.

the bizarre thing is that the recent reg changes meant half the products available were not compliant, i’m amazed triple glazing wasn’t in the current regs pass group.

this is what my go-to glazing firm told me last year ( SCI glazing in Morden) they did triple glazing at my old place and it wasn’t much of an upcharge over double, i specifically went for it as the surface temp of the inner pane was a fair bit higher than double and because the sofa was below a window I wanted to eliminate draughts cause by the rising air over a cold surface.

the windows were Platinum NRG.

The leccy rad will cost you a fortune to run. Why not just stump up for a plumbed-in rad? Won’t be long before payback.

Yeah I’m just annoyed we didn’t do it as part of the renovation. We had planned to fit a new door etc but the council changed their minds halfway through. The ufh just doesn’t cut the mustard in that corner which and just feels like all the heat is getting sucked out.

I can’t find any, non-ugly, thermal curtains

1 Attachment