Wall insulation in Cadnam and Bartley, cavity first

Looking before filling. An age gives you an expectation, not a fact. The camera shows the true cavity width, whether the builders left mortar snots bridging the gap, whether there are cavity trays over the openings, and whether the inner leaf is dry. Ten minutes of survey saves an argument later, and it costs nothing.

Bonded bead. Polystyrene bead blown in with an adhesive so it locks together. It flows past obstructions, gets into a narrow cavity, sheds water rather than holding it and does not settle afterwards, which is why we specify it on anything exposed or anything under about 70mm. It is the material we reach for most often round here.

Blown mineral wool. Cheaper to install and perfectly good in a wide, clean, sheltered cavity. Its weakness is water: if driven rain crosses the gap the fibre holds it against the inner leaf. On a sheltered mid terrace or an inner elevation it is fine. On a weather facing gable it is not.

Cavities that already have something in them. From the mid 1970s builders started fitting partial fill boards against the inner leaf, leaving a clear gap in front. Blowing loose fill into that gap bridges it and is a common way to create damp on a house that was fine. The camera tells us which you have before anything is ordered.

The walls we turn down. A wet cavity, one full of rubble at the base, one bridged with mortar, or a wall with no trays over the windows. Filling those buys a small saving in heat loss and a large chance of penetrating damp. Where a fill has failed and slumped, leaving the top metre empty, we extract it, dry the wall and give an honest view on refilling.

Solid walls, where you have one. Older cottages and the odd single skin extension have a nine inch or half brick wall with nothing to fill. Those take internal wall insulation, insulated plasterboard or PIR such as Celotex or Kingspan on a batten or stud frame with taped joints, or external wall insulation with a mesh basecoat and a render carrier over the outside.

Reveals and junctions. A filled cavity still leaves cold bridges at the window reveals, the threshold, the floor junction, the eaves and the joist ends, and those are the strips where condensation and black mould show up. Reveals too shallow for a board take an aerogel laminate. This is the slow work and the first thing a thin quote drops.

Ventilation. Airtightness without ventilation is a trade, not a gain. Trickle vents in the windows, extract fans that actually move air, air bricks kept clear and not filled over, to the rates in Approved Document F.

Same team from first visit to last, one person to ring, and no sub-contracting your work out to somebody you have never met. 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.

The New Forest National Park Authority is the planning authority here rather than the district council, so anything that changes the outside face of a wall goes to them; their interactive property map shows what covers your address. Internal insulation and a cavity fill are not development, which the Planning Portal's insulation guidance confirms, but regulation 23 brings building control in once you renovate more than half of a wall.

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. If the damp is on one elevation only, tell us which way it faces, because that is usually the whole answer. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

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Most of the housing here belongs to a single building period, roughly the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it is a good period for this work. Cavities from those years are generally wide enough, the brick and block construction is consistent, and the walls were built before the fashion for partial fill boards, so there is usually a clear gap to work with.

That has two practical consequences. The first is that a cavity fill here is a genuinely quick job with a short payback, one day, drilled from outside, nothing to move indoors and no scaffold on a bungalow. The second is that this stock has a lot of bungalows and wide fronted detached houses, which means a large wall area for the floor area inside, so the wall is a bigger share of your heat loss than it would be in a two storey terrace.

The catch is the detail rather than the fill. Houses of this age often have no cavity trays over the windows and doors, thin or absent insulation at the reveals, and joist ends built into the inner leaf. So we quote the fill and the reveal work together, and where the camera finds no trays we say so plainly rather than fill the wall and hope. We do not run a guarantee scheme of our own, and a cavity fill installation is normally covered by an independent one, so keep the paperwork with your EPC.

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