Insulation in Boscombe

The void over a top floor flat. Many blocks and converted houses in Boscombe have a shallow roof space above the top flat, reached through a hatch on the landing. Often nothing has ever been laid in it.

Where we can get into a Boscombe roof void, it is mineral wool, eco roll or similar, laid between the joists and then across them, to around 270mm in all, so the joists stop acting as a cold bridge. Where the void is too shallow to crawl, we work from the hatch outwards, and board the hatch and draught seal it at the end. That space is usually common parts, so the freeholder has to agree first. A top floor job is typically a day.

Rooms in the roof of a converted villa. When the big Victorian and Edwardian houses were split into flats, the top flat often ended up in the roof itself: sloping ceilings, dormers, knee walls and no loft floor at all. Here the insulation goes between and under the rafters as rigid PIR board, Celotex or similar, with a ventilation gap kept above it and a vapour control layer behind new plasterboard. Where a sloping ceiling cannot lose much headroom, a multi-layer foil quilt such as TLX gives a real improvement in very little depth. This is priced by the room and includes making good the plaster, and it usually takes several days per room instead of one.

Houses with a proper loft. The smaller number of houses here usually have an open loft that takes an ordinary top-up. Where boards have been screwed down onto squashed wool, we lift them, bring the depth up and put the boarding back on raised legs so you keep the storage. The tank and pipework get lagging, downlighters get covers, and vent trays keep the eaves open. Our loft insulation page for Boscombe goes into that job in detail.

Walls. The older houses here are mostly solid brick, with no cavity to fill. The choice is internal wall insulation on the coldest rooms, or external wall insulation, EWI, which on these streets is often a planning question. More on that on our wall insulation page for Boscombe.

When we would talk you out of it. If the loft is already wet, or the mould is coming from a leak or a bathroom with no extract, more insulation will make it worse. We sort the cause first.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: the survey, clearing what is there, the material and its depth, ventilation works and disposal on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Nothing done inside a loft or a room in the roof needs planning. Building control applies when you renovate a large part of a roof or wall, under regulation 23, and the finished work has to meet Approved Document L. Anything on the outside is different: Boscombe has five conservation areas of its own, the council keeps the list, and flats have no permitted development rights, as the Planning Portal sets out.

Ring rather than use the form. Insulation is rarely an emergency, but a loft dripping with condensation, black mould coming back faster than you can wash it off, or a room that will not hold heat before a cold snap all get looked at quickly.

The first visit is about finding out whether the problem is insulation, ventilation or both, because insulating a roof space that cannot breathe makes it worse. In a converted villa with several kitchens and bathrooms beneath a single roof, open a window, run the extractor, and tell the managing agent in writing if the roof space is shared. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Boscombe has five conservation areas of its own: Boscombe Spa, laid out with villas around the chine in the Victorian era, Boscombe Manor, Churchill Gardens, Knole Road and Undercliff Road. The houses that feel the cold most, big solid-walled villas with high ceilings and tall windows, are concentrated in exactly those streets.

That matters for insulation, because the obvious fix for a solid wall, wrapping the outside in external wall insulation and render, changes how the building looks. In a conservation area, cladding a house is not permitted development under Part 1 of the permitted development order, so it needs planning permission, and a brick or stucco villa front is unlikely to get it.

So in those streets we plan from the inside. The roof comes first, since that is where the easiest heat is lost and nothing shows from the road. Then internal wall insulation on the coldest rooms, usually the north and seaward walls, using a lining that lets the old brickwork dry out rather than trapping damp against it, as BS 5250 advises. We work around cornices, shutters and window reveals rather than through them, and tell you plainly where the loss of room is not worth it.

Nearby places we also cover for insulation, with straight-line distances from Boscombe, and the other trades we offer in Boscombe itself.

Everything we do in Boscombe Insulation, all areas Every area we cover