Brief
If you’re renovating your house, how should you tackle insulating the roof, walls and floors? Energy efficiency expert Tim Pullen shares his advice.
Insight
How to insulate your house is about making your home more comfortable to live in, thereby preventing the urge to ramp up the heating.
It’s therefore also about saving energy, and saving money and carbon — particularly important in present times. And having insulation installed will usually repay the investment many times over. Better, in that respect, than any form of renewable energy.
But if you’re renovating a house how much are you likely to have to budget to insulate it well? And if your budget is restricted, should you invest in one thing above the other — for example, is insulating walls more important than insulating than the roof? Or should you strike a balance between insulating the whole house?
Here’s our energy efficiency expert Tim Pullen’s advice on how to insulate your home, and where best to invest.
How to insulate your house: Where to start?
For a new build, the Building Regulations set a minimum standard of insulation for each element – roof, walls and floor – so in one respect, decision making is easier. Many self builders creating their own homes tend to go above and beyond those standards.
However, in existing house it is more often the house itself that sets the standard by limiting what is actually possible.
“What’s more, factors such as the how the walls, floors and roof are constructed will all have a bearing on how you insulate as well what level of insulation is included. As such, there’s ‘no one-size-fits-all’ approach to insulating existing homes,” says Homebuilding & Renovating editor Claire Lloyd.
Here we’ll look at the common approaches to insulating roofs, walls and floors and some of the opportunities and challenges presented. Insulating an accessible loft space is a far easier and cheaper task than externally insulating a wall, for instance.
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