Wall insulation in Boscombe

Villa, terrace or block makes the difference. A villa by Boscombe Chine, an Edwardian terrace off Christchurch Road in Pokesdown and a block put up since 2000 can all be rendered and all look alike from the pavement. The first two almost always have a nine inch solid wall; the block has a cavity, often already insulated when it was built. The borescope settles it in minutes, and every price after that follows from what is down the hole.

Internal wall insulation on solid walls. This is the main job in Boscombe. On an old solid wall we favour a breathable build-up: wood fibre or mineral wool between battens or a stud, with a vapour control layer only where the calculation says it belongs, then boarded and skimmed. Insulated plasterboard with a PIR backing, such as Celotex or Kingspan board, buys more for the depth on a drier wall, and an aerogel board suits a narrow reveal with no room to give. It is done a room at a time, usually the coldest north-facing room first, and a typical room takes a few days including the skim.

Bays, reveals and joist ends. On an old wall the cold gets round insulation at the window reveals, the floor junction, the threshold and the joist ends built into the brick. Skip them and condensation settles in that cold strip, with black mould close behind. The deep bays on the villas are the worst: three short walls, a cill and a thin ceiling above, so the bay is treated as a cold bridge detail of its own.

Cavity walls, and who fills them. The later houses and some blocks have a cavity. If the borescope shows it clear, dry and wide enough, and the wall is not on an exposed seaward face, a fill of bonded bead or mineral wool blown in through drilled holes is usually worth doing. That work should be carried out by a registered cavity wall installer, and you should get CIGA paperwork for it at the end, so keep it with the deeds. We tell you whether the wall suits it, and look after the inside: ventilation, the reveals and any making good. A wet or narrow cavity we tell you to leave alone.

Cladding the outside. EWI fixes board to the outside, then a render carrier and a thin coat finish, and it removes the cold bridges at floors and corners in one go. On a plain block built since the war it is often the best answer. On a villa with moulded window surrounds, and in any of Boscombe's five conservation areas, it is usually the wrong one, as the local section below explains.

Air in bedsits and converted flats. Many villas in Boscombe were cut into flats and bedsits with a kitchen or shower squeezed into a former bedroom. Line those walls and the draughts that were drying them stop, the dew point moves, and interstitial condensation can form behind the new board unless trickle vents, a working extract fan and any air brick someone blocked up are sorted at the same time. Done properly, the room holds its heat and the EPC moves with it, which a landlord with an HMO licence will care about.

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 and any borescope check, the system and its thickness, making good around windows and doors, 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.

Lining a wall inside needs no planning application, as Planning Portal guidance on insulation says, but it is building control work under regulation 23 and has to meet Approved Document L. Insulating the outside can need planning, explained in the Planning Portal's external walls guidance, and Boscombe has five conservation areas; the council keeps the list.

Ring rather than use the form. Damp patches or black mould appearing on an outside wall after cavity fill or internal lining usually means water is tracking across the cavity, or warm air is reaching a cold surface at a junction.

We look before we take anything out, because the fix depends on which of those it is. In a converted villa, check the flat above is not leaking before blaming the wall, and keep furniture a hand's width off the cold wall until we have seen it. 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 Manor, Boscombe Spa, Churchill Gardens, Knole Road and Undercliff Road. Much of what they protect is the outside of the Victorian and Edwardian villas, the brick, the stucco, the mouldings round the windows and the depth of the reveals.

External wall insulation adds a thick layer to all of that, pushes the render out past the window frames and buries the detail. Inside one of those areas, a change like that to the look of a building is a planning question for BCP Council before any board goes on. And many of these villas are now flats, which have no householder permitted development rights at all, so external work on them needs thought wherever the building is.

That is why, on a Boscombe villa, we point people to the inside. Internal lining leaves the front exactly as it is, needs no planning application, and can be done flat by flat, which suits a building where the outside belongs to the freeholder and the inside belongs to you. If an EWI system is what you want on a plainer building, we check the address against the council's map first and tell you plainly whether it needs an application.

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

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