Insulation in Breamore

Hand cut joists, so every roll gets cut to fit. There are more than sixty listed entries in and around this village, and an old roof was not put together with a truss plant. Ceiling joists are hand cut, they sit at odd centres, and a roll of mineral wool that is right for one bay is two inches wide for the next. That just means the material gets cut to fit rather than dropped in and left with gaps down both sides, and it makes the second layer across the joists matter more than usual. Full depth is 270mm of ordinary eco roll worked in two directions, an even 250mm carried right to the wall plate, and 0.16 is the u-value a renovated element is expected to reach. Where old material has settled to half its thickness, gone sooty around a flue or got wet under a slipped tile, it comes out and goes with us.

Ceilings that will not take weight. A lath and plaster ceiling holds itself up and nothing else. Put a knee between the joists and you have a plastering job as well as an insulation one. We work off crawl boards, and where you want storage afterwards it goes on raised loft legs over a proper depth rather than boarding screwed straight onto the joists squashing the wool flat.

Where there is a room in the roof there is no loft floor and the insulation belongs at rafter level: rigid PIR board between the rafters with the ventilation gap kept open, then a layer under them so the timber is not a cold bridge. Where headroom is tight a foil faced multi-layer quilt such as TLX gets part of the way, with sealed laps and an air gap either side. A dormer on one of those rooms is built as a warm roof, cheeks and top together. Where an old roof still has bitumen felt under the tiles rather than a breathable membrane, that vented gap is not optional and we will not fill it, whatever depth it costs you. A wall with no cavity is either internal wall insulation, which takes a little off the room and means dealing with skirtings and reveals, or external wall insulation, EWI on a quote, which changes how the building looks. On a wall that has always breathed, the material matters as much as the thickness, and wood fibre suits these buildings better than foil faced board. Newer houses do have cavity walls, checked with a borescope, because an unfilled cavity and one full of slumped fill look identical from outside. A suspended timber ground floor over a vented void is a real source of draught and can be insulated between the joists provided the air bricks stay clear. With getting on for four in ten homes out here on oil, that draught costs more than it would in town. Then lagging on pipe runs through a cold roof space and covers over the downlighters.

No rate per square metre: the area is the easy part. A post-war house with a hatch on the landing, a cottage where the loft is reached through the back of a bedroom cupboard, and a converted outbuilding with no loft at all and everything at rafter level are three different days before any material arrives. Old material that has to come out and be bagged is a cost of its own. Approved Document L sets what the work must reach. Ask what depth is going down, what the material is on a wall that has to breathe, and whether the consent has been checked.

We cover Breamore, Woodgreen, Rockbourne, Sandleheath, Fordingbridge and the villages along the Avon, and most of SP6. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.