Wall insulation in Milford on Sea

The borescope check, before anything else. One hole, a camera, and a straight answer. A clear dry cavity of a sensible width can take a fill. One bridged by mortar snots, one already wet, one too narrow, or one on a wall rated severely exposed for wind driven rain under BS 8104 cannot, or not with every material. Nobody can tell you that from the pavement, and no honest quote is written without it.

Cavity fill: bead or mineral wool. Bonded polystyrene bead is blown through a pattern of drilled holes and sets into a mass that will not settle. Blown mineral wool is water repellent and cheaper, but it is the one we would not put in an exposed seaward wall, because it can carry water across a wet cavity. Either way the holes are made good in a matched mortar, and a house is a day.

Solid walls, which cannot be filled at all. A nine inch brick wall, a rendered cob or flint one, or anything built before the brick and block cavity became standard has nothing to fill. The two real options are internal wall insulation or external wall insulation, and they are different jobs at different prices.

Internal wall insulation. Insulated plasterboard bonded and mechanically fixed to a flat wall, or PIR board such as Celotex or Kingspan set between battens or a stud, then boarded and skimmed. It eats a little room and it moves radiators, sockets and skirtings. On a breathable wall we build it breathable, in wood fibre and lime rather than a vapour tight sandwich.

External wall insulation. Board fixed to the outside, a render carrier and mesh over it, then a through coloured finish. It keeps the wall itself warm, so interstitial condensation has nowhere to form, and it takes no floor area. It changes the look of the building completely.

The junctions, which are most of the labour. Window and door reveals, the threshold, the floor junction, the eaves and the joist ends. A reveal too shallow for a normal board takes a thin aerogel panel instead. Get these wrong and you have built a cold bridge, and a thermal bridge is where the dew point lands and where black mould turns up first.

Failed and slumped fill. Where a fill has settled and left the top of the wall bare, or has wetted up, it is extracted through drilled holes and the cavity dried first.

Ventilation, because a tighter house needs it. Trickle vents in the windows, a working extract in the kitchen and bathroom, and air bricks left clear. Approved Document F sets what is expected, and airtightness without ventilation is how you turn a draughty house into a damp one.

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.

New Forest District Council is the planning authority. Insulating the inside face of a wall is not development and needs no permission, which the Planning Portal's insulation guidance confirms. External wall insulation changes the outer face, so the external walls guidance is where to start, and with 28 listed entries around the village consent can be needed for internal work too. Building control comes in under regulation 23 once a thermal element is renovated, and Part L sets the U value.

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. Send a photograph of the patch and tell us which elevation it is on, because on a seaward wall that one detail often answers the question before we arrive. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Call now: 07435 839745

Wind driven rain is not the same as rain. It arrives horizontally with enough force to be pushed into the face of a wall and held there, and the exposure maps in BS 8104 put this coast in the severe band. Salt matters too, because it keeps masonry damp for longer between showers, so an outer leaf here dries more slowly than the same brick ten miles inland.

That changes one decision. An unfilled cavity is a break. Water gets through the outer leaf, runs down the inside face of it and goes out again at the trays and weep holes without ever touching the inner leaf. Put the wrong fill in, or any fill into a cavity bridged with mortar droppings, and you have handed that water a bridge. The damp that follows is penetrating rather than condensation, and it shows on the inside of the elevation the weather comes from.

So we treat the seaward and south west walls of a Milford house separately from the sheltered ones. Sometimes the answer is a bead fill, which bonds and does not wick. Sometimes it is filling three walls, leaving the fourth and lining that one inside. Sometimes, on a rendered wall already showing cracking or a blown patch, it is to sort the render out first.

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