Wall insulation in Fordingbridge

Cavity fill on the estates. Bonded polystyrene bead blown through a drilled pattern, or blown mineral wool where the wall is sheltered and the outer leaf sound. The cavity has to be clear, dry and wide enough. Where it is bridged with mortar, wet, or holding a fill that has failed and slumped, we say so instead of blowing more in. Holes made good in a matched mortar.

Solid walls on the old streets. A nine inch brick wall in Fordingbridge, or a rendered rubble one, has nothing in it to inject, however similar it looks to a brick and block house on the next road. The choice is internal wall insulation or external wall insulation.

Why external is usually out in the old town. A Fordingbridge house fronting the pavement has no ground outside it to build on, and adding a hundred millimetres to a street elevation is not something you can do without permission or without affecting the neighbours. Behind the frontage, on a rear elevation or a gable with space around it, external wall insulation with a render carrier and mesh becomes a proper option again.

Internal wall insulation. Wood fibre bedded in lime and finished in lime plaster on an old soft or damp Fordingbridge wall, so it stays breathable and vapour can pass through rather than gathering as interstitial condensation. Insulated plasterboard, or PIR board such as Celotex or Kingspan on battens or a timber stud, where the wall is dry and hard enough to take a sealed face.

Flats and shared buildings. A good share of the homes in Fordingbridge are flats, many of them in converted houses. Where the wall is part of the shared structure the freeholder or the managing agent has to instruct the work, and we will tell you that at the visit rather than after the quote.

The junctions. Reveals, the threshold, the floor junction, the eaves, the joist ends and the party wall in a Fordingbridge terrace. A shallow reveal takes a thin aerogel board. Anything missed is a cold bridge, and a thermal bridge is where the dew point lands and black mould appears.

Ventilation. Trickle vents, a working extract in the kitchen and bathroom, and air bricks kept clear, which is what Approved Document F expects. Tightening the fabric without giving the moisture a route out is how a draughty room becomes a damp one.

Thomas's first job is to find out what your walls are. On an estate house he drills one small hole in a mortar joint and looks into the cavity with a borescope. On an older house he checks the wall thickness and the brick bond, because a solid wall has no cavity to fill.

His written quote prices the survey and the borescope check, the insulation system and how thick it is, making good at windows and doors, any ventilation work, and the waste. A fill on an estate house should be put in by a registered installer and carry a CIGA certificate.

Most homes in Fordingbridge are seventies and eighties cavity brick, so the likely answer is cavity fill: holes drilled from outside off a ladder or tower, the fill blown in, and each hole pointed up to match. An older solid walled house in the town centre is lined inside with insulated plasterboard, a room at a time, or insulated outside. Furniture is moved and covered, and the waste goes with us. Rubble found in a cavity is shown to you on camera, with a price to clear it, before any fill goes in.

Lining a wall inside is not development, as the Planning Portal confirms. External insulation changes the outer face, so start with the Planning Portal page on external walls, especially inside the town centre conservation area. Listed building consent reaches internal work too. Building control at New Forest District Council comes in under regulation 23 when a thermal element is renovated, with Part L setting the U-value the wall must reach.

Damp patches or black mould on an outside wall that appeared after it was filled or given an internal lining point to two possible culprits: rain tracking across the cavity through the fill, or warm indoor air hitting a cold surface at a junction.

Wipe the mould off, open the windows, and hold off painting over it. Ring rather than use the form, and tell us roughly when the house was built and when the insulation went in. The first visit works out which it is, with a borescope if needed, before anything is taken out. Our booked days are Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. A call we miss is one we return as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Roughly a fifth of the homes in Fordingbridge predate 1919 and the biggest single block of building came in the seventies and early eighties. Those two groups are not variations on the same job. They are opposites. One has a wall you cannot fill and no room outside to build on. The other has a wall you probably can fill, from the outside, in a day.

That matters when you are comparing quotes, because the two are priced nothing like each other and a salesman who has not looked at the wall will assume you are the cheap one. If somebody offers you a cavity fill on a house built before the First World War without putting a camera in the wall first, they are guessing, and the guess is wrong more often than not.

It also changes the order of the work. On the estates the wall is often the first thing worth doing, because it is quick and heat loss through it is a large share of the total. In the old town the wall is usually the last thing, after the draughts, the ventilation and any repair to the pointing or the render, because a lining put on an untreated wall creates problems rather than solving them. We will tell you which of those you are looking at on the first visit.

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

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