Insulation in Southbourne

Lofts in Edwardian and inter-war houses. These roofs were cut by hand on site, often hipped, with purlins, struts and a chimney breast in the middle of the loft rather than a clear run of trusses. The original layer, where there is one, is usually thin, flattened and laid between the joists only.

We top it up with mineral wool laid across the joists to around 270mm in all, pushed in under the purlins and down into the hips where the old job stopped short. Vent trays keep the eaves open, the tank and pipes get lagging, the hatch is insulated and draught sealed, and downlighter covers go in. Most lofts are a day, and the loft is the cheapest heat loss in the house to fix. If you want storage, we raise the boarding on legs so it does not crush the insulation. Our loft insulation page for Southbourne covers that job on its own.

Chalet bungalows and rooms in the roof. A bedroom built into the roof, often lit by a dormer, has three cold parts: the sloping ceiling, the short knee walls, and the small voids behind them. We insulate the voids and the floor between them, then the slope between and under the rafters with rigid PIR board such as Celotex, leaving a ventilation gap above and a vapour control layer under the new plasterboard. Where headroom is tight, a multi-layer foil such as TLX does more in less depth. Where the whole roof is being recovered anyway, insulating over the rafters as a warm roof keeps the room at full height. A room takes several days, plastering included, and the finished slope has to reach the U-value the regulations set for a renovated roof.

Top floor flats. Many of the large houses between the Grove and the cliff are now flats. The void above the top one belongs to the building rather than the flat, so we quote it for the freeholder, with access, material and making good on separate lines.

Walls. Some houses here have cavities and some are solid, and they need different answers: cavity fill where the wall and its exposure suit it, internal wall insulation where they do not. See wall insulation in Southbourne for that work.

When we would say no. A loft with damp timber, or a room with mould from a bathroom that does not vent, needs the cause fixed first. Insulation on top of that only hides it.

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.

Insulating a loft or a room in the roof needs no planning. Building control comes in when a large part of a roof or wall is renovated, under regulation 23, and the result has to meet Approved Document L. Anything added outside is a planning matter in the Southbourne Grove conservation area and on a block of flats, the council keeps the list, and the Planning Portal explains the rules.

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 are all worth a call.

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. On a cliff-top house where the mould is on the wall that faces the sea, tell us which wall when you ring, because that points to a different cause. 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

Southbourne was built mostly in the Edwardian years and between the wars, and that is exactly the period when house building in this country moved from solid brick walls to cavity walls. So two houses on the same road can have completely different walls.

You can often tell from the brickwork. If every few rows show the short ends of the bricks as well as the long sides, the wall is almost certainly solid. If every brick shows its long side, there is probably a cavity. A solid wall cannot be filled, so the options are lining it from the inside, or wrapping it outside, which inside the Southbourne Grove conservation area needs planning permission.

Having a cavity is not the end of the question. The houses near Southbourne Overcliff Drive take the wind and rain straight off the sea, and a filled cavity on a wall that exposed can carry water across to the inside face. How much driving rain a wall takes is assessed under BS 8104, and it decides whether fill is sensible at all, and which kind. We check the brickwork, the pointing and which way the wall faces before recommending cavity fill, and on the most exposed walls we may recommend lining the inside instead.

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

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