Wall insulation in Milborne St Andrew, wall by wall

Settling what the wall is. Thickness at the reveal, the brick bond, the age of the house and the sound it makes when you tap it all give a hint. The borescope gives the answer: cavity or not, how wide, clear or bridged, dry or wet, and whether somebody has already filled it. It costs you nothing and it decides everything after it.

Filling a cavity. Holes drilled on a grid in the mortar joints, the fill blown in, the holes pointed up to match. Bonded bead handles a narrow or awkward cavity and stays where it is put. Blown mineral wool is a good clean cavity material and a poor choice anywhere driven rain crosses the gap. A day for most houses, with the drill outside and nothing to move indoors.

The walls we refuse to fill. Wet cavities. Cavities bridged with mortar. Walls with no cavity trays over the openings. Anything under about 50mm. Filling those does not save heat, it just gives water a bridge to the inside face and the mould arrives the following winter.

Lining a solid wall from inside. Insulated plasterboard on a stud or batten frame, PIR such as Celotex or Kingspan where the wall is sound modern brick, wood fibre and lime plaster where it is old and needs to breathe. Joints taped, the vapour control layer kept continuous, and the electrics moved out to the new face rather than buried behind it.

Insulating from outside. Board fixed and bonded to the wall, a mesh reinforced basecoat over it, then a silicone finish or a render carrier and a traditional topcoat. It gives the best U value and it does not shrink your rooms, but it takes the eaves, the verges, the sills and every pipe with it, so it is a bigger piece of work than it looks.

Reveals, floors and joist ends. Insulating the middle of a wall and stopping at the window leaves a cold bridge round every opening, and that is exactly where the black mould grows. Reveals get a thin high performance board or an aerogel laminate, the floor junction gets carried down behind the skirting, and joist ends built into a solid wall are detailed so they can still breathe.

Ventilation. Every insulation job makes a house tighter, and a tighter house needs a way out for moisture. Trickle vents, working extract fans, air bricks left clear. Approved Document F sets what is expected, and skipping it is how a warm house becomes a mouldy one.

Putting right what has failed. Slumped fill with an empty top metre, a wet cavity that needs clearing and drying, a lining that was fitted with no vapour control layer and is now black behind. We take it out, dry it, and give you a straight view on whether it is worth doing again.

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.

There is no conservation area covering the village, and insulating a wall internally is not development in any case, which the Planning Portal's insulation guidance confirms. External wall insulation is a different matter and is worth checking against the rules on external walls before you commit. Building control engages through regulation 23 when more than half an element is renovated, and Dorset Council is the authority.

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. A photograph of the wall from outside and one of the damp patch inside, taken the same day, saves a visit's worth of guessing. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Call now: 07435 839745

There are twenty five listed entries in this parish, and the thing that catches people out is that listed building consent is not about what the street can see. Section 7 of the 1990 Act covers any works affecting the character of a listed building, inside as much as outside. Dry lining a bedroom wall is works. So is losing a run of historic lime plaster behind a sheet of insulated plasterboard.

That is not a reason to give up on a cold cottage, it is a reason to design the job differently. Consent is far more likely for a reversible, breathable build up, wood fibre bedded in lime, than for a foil faced board screwed through the original plaster. Dorset Council publishes what is listed and how to apply on its listed buildings pages, and the conservation officer would far rather talk before the work than after it.

Where consent is not going to come, we say so. On a lot of these cottages the sensible money goes into the loft, the draughts round doors and floorboards, and secondary glazing, none of which touch the historic fabric and all of which cut the heat loss you actually feel.

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