Insulation in Hangersley

Lofts that turned into three lofts. Houses here have been added to over fifty years: a bedroom over the garage, a rear extension, a sun room across the back. Each of those has its own roof void, and it very often does not connect to the main one. The survey is half about finding a way into every void rather than the obvious hatch on the landing, because the usual pattern is one space done properly, one done badly in the eighties and one never touched at all. That is why one end of a house like this is warm and the other is not.

Exposed eaves, and wind moving through the material. Up on the Western Escarpment the wind comes off open ground with nothing to slow it, and it gets into an open eaves. Loose mineral wool sitting at the perimeter of a windy loft has air blowing through it, and material with air moving through it is not doing the job the depth on the label says it is. We hold the edge with vent trays so the air path over the wall head stays open, and close the perimeter so the wind runs above the material instead of through it. On this side of Ringwood that detail is the difference between a loft that works and one that measures well.

More than half the housing here went up between 1945 and 1982. Where the existing layer is dry and simply settled we work with it: lift, straighten, and add the between and over layer so the joists themselves stop being cold lines across the ceiling. Aim at 270mm of mineral wool, though 250mm laid to the wall plate is worth more than a deeper heap that stops a foot short. Anything wet, compressed flat under boarding, or full of debris comes out, gets bagged and leaves with us.

Plenty of houses here have gone upwards rather than outwards, and once a roof is a room in roof conversion there is no loft floor left to fill. That is a warm roof build-up: rigid PIR board cut tight between the rafters, a continuous layer of board or a multi-layer foil quilt such as TLX across them so the rafters are not a cold bridge every four hundred millimetres, a vapour control layer on the warm side and a clear air gap kept above. Skip the air gap and you move the condensation off the ceiling and into the roof timbers, where you will not see it for years.

The brick cottages round here have no cavity to fill, so it is internal wall insulation on the coldest elevations, built so the wall can still dry, or external wall insulation, EWI, which changes the outside of a building inside a conservation area. On a post-war house the cavity may be empty, may be part filled already, and only a borescope tells you which. Then the small things: a hatch insulated on its back and sealed round the frame, raised boarding on legs where storage matters, fire rated covers so downlighters can be run over, and lagging on the tank and its pipework.

A price per square metre tells you nothing here. The area is the easy part. A Forest edge cottage with a loft you can barely sit up in, a seventies detached with three separate roof voids, and a garden room with a flat roof are three different jobs before anybody opens a bag. Old material has to be bagged and taken away before anything new goes down. Approved Document L sets what the work is expected to reach. A quote that does not name a finished depth, or mention the eaves, is not the same job as one that does.

We cover Hangersley, Ringwood, Ashley Heath and the rest of BH24, and out into the Forest villages beyond. 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.