When moving into a new home it is worth ensuring that it is as energy efficient as it can be. This is even more important as energy bills have recently increased by 27% on average for UK households. If you have recently moved home, or will be moving soon, here’s how you can check if your home is properly insulated and what you can do if you’re having to ask “who can I use to get better insulation near me?”
Check how old the building is
Generally speaking, new build houses should be fairly energy efficient in comparison to older homes thanks to modern building materials and current building regulations. The age of your home can help you to determine if your house has solid or cavity walls. These wall types need insulating in different ways if they have not already been insulated. It is therefore important to know what type of wall you are working with before taking any further steps.
If your home is more than 100 years old, it is likely that it will have been built with solid walls which are not as energy efficient as cavity walls. Fortunately these homes can benefit from External Wall Insulation (EWI). You can often tell if your older home has EWI already as it covers the outer brickwork of a building and generally has a smooth appearance. However, some EWI installers do offer brick effect EWI renderings so bear this in mind when checking.
When it comes to determining if you have cavity walls, you are very likely to have them if your home was built after 1920 but this does not necessarily mean that it has cavity wall insulation. Keep reading for some more in depth ways of determining if your cavity walls are insulated.
If your home was built after 1990 you are lucky because your home has a very high chance of having cavity wall insulation installed.
Measure your walls
If you are still not sure about what type of walls your home has, you can try measuring the width of your walls. This will be the distance between the internal and external edges of the wall. If the wall is more than 260mm thick then you probably have cavity walls. You could also potentially work out what type of wall you have by examining the pattern of your brickwork.
Other options at this stage may be to speak to a professional assessor or consult any paperwork that came with the house when you bought it. Which leads nicely into the next section of this article…
Read the EPC
You are likely to have received an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) with your new home. If you cannot locate one for your home you can use a government service to find one. The purpose of this document is to show homeowners how energy efficient their homes are based on a rating scale of G (Not energy efficient) to A (Very energy efficient).
This document will also provide homeowners with some suggestions on how their home could improve its energy efficiency rating. If the EPC is up to date and it is telling you that your home would benefit from a certain type of insulation, then it is a very good indicator that it is time to speak to an insulation installer.
Look for signs
It is always best to use the above tried and trusted methods to determine if your home is well insulated but it will not do any harm to be aware of some of the signs you might notice day-to-day if your home is not well insulated.
Classic signs that your home is not well insulated can include that it’s very difficult to keep it warm in the winter, dampness and ice form inside the home and you experience cold draughts inside the building. You might also notice that your energy bills are much higher than you would expect them to be.
If it looks like your house is not well insulated, what can you do?
If you have determined that your house is not insulated well, or at all, your first port of call should be speaking to a professional.
The best insulation installation professionals will be able to not only determine what the best type of insulation is for your home, but they will also use the best materials and install the insulation to the highest possible standard.
This means that your house will soon be easier to heat in the winter and will begin to start feeling more like a home.
