Wall insulation in Hamworthy

What is in the wall. The sixties and seventies housing that makes up most of Hamworthy was built with brick and block cavity walls, usually left empty when they went up. Many have been filled since, some well and some not.

The inter-war houses in Hamworthy may have a narrow early cavity, and the oldest houses nearer the bridge can be nine inch solid brick with no cavity at all. From the street, once rendered or dashed, they look alike, so we drill one small hole in a mortar joint and look in with a borescope.

Filling a wall on a peninsula. With water on three sides, many Hamworthy walls take rain driven straight off Poole Harbour, Holes Bay or Lytchett Bay. If the cavity is clear, dry and wide enough, bonded polystyrene bead suits those exposed walls; blown mineral wool is fine on a sheltered one. It goes in through a pattern of drilled holes, made good in matching mortar. A registered installer does the fill and issues CIGA paperwork. Our part is the survey, the render and pointing repairs first, and the making good.

A fill that has failed. Old fibre can slump and leave a cold band along the top of the wall, and a wet cavity carries water straight across to the inside leaf, which shows as penetrating damp on the weather side. The borescope shows which. A wet or slumped fill comes out before anything new goes in, and the cause, usually pointing, render or a leaking gutter, is dealt with first.

The older houses along Blandford Road. The few pre-war and Victorian houses towards Poole Bridge can be nine inch solid brick, sometimes pointed in lime. Internal wall insulation lines the inside face: insulated plasterboard bonded to the brick, or a stud or batten frame with PIR such as Celotex or Kingspan between, boarded and skimmed, with a breathable build where the wall has to dry. External wall insulation, board with a render carrier and a thin coat finish, keeps the rooms their size and wraps the thermal bridge at the corners and eaves. Either way the reveals, floor junction and joist ends are detailed, because that is where heat loss and condensation start.

Air in a sealed-up post-war house. Many sixties and seventies houses in Hamworthy have had new windows and a blocked fireplace since they were built, so filling or lining the walls removes the last of the draughts. Trickle vents, a working extract fan and air bricks clear of later paths are part of the job, and a taped vapour control layer keeps interstitial condensation out of an internal lining. The U value and the EPC improve, and you feel it long before the payback.

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.

Filling a cavity or lining a wall from inside is not development, as the Planning Portal insulation guidance explains, and Hamworthy has no conservation area of its own. External insulation that changes the look of a house can still need permission, and on one of the few listed buildings any of it needs consent. All of it is building control work: regulation 23 brings a renovated wall under part L and Approved Document L.

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. On a wall that looks out over Holes Bay or the harbour, rain driven in off the water is the first suspect. 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

Semis and terraces make up a large part of Hamworthy, and on a joined house the cavity does not stop where your ownership does. Pump fill into an empty cavity at the end of a semi and, unless it is stopped, it runs along into next door's wall.

The installer deals with this by fitting a cavity barrier at the line of the party wall before filling, so the fill stays on your side. That barrier has to be in the right place, which is one more reason the survey comes first.

It also matters what next door has. If their half was filled years ago with a different material and yours is empty, the join between the two is where a cold spot and a damp patch tend to appear. The same goes for external insulation on one house in a row: the new face stands proud of the neighbour's wall, and that step has to be closed and weathered properly. So talk to your neighbour before the work, find out what they had done, and if any of the work cuts into the party wall itself, read the government's party wall guidance first.

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

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