To insulate or not to insulate?
There is no doubt that home insulation is good. It’s good for our pockets, it’s good for our comfort and it’s good for the environment
BUT! –yes there is a but!
What sort of insulation is best?
The very first thing to do is to stop drafts. Draft exclusion is generally cheap, easy to do (even if you’re not able to do it yourself a local trusted tradesperson will do the job for you), it’s easy to check if it’s worked.
The most frequent causes of draughts are external doors, followed by windows and then maybe the loft cover. If your house is double glazed and fitted with modern doors then draughts may not be a problem but wait for a windy day and go round your house and check.
Next on the list should be loft insulation but be cautious.
You may well have been told that up to 45% of a building’s heat can be lost through the roof. This is true but unless you have no loft or roof insulation at all it is very unlikely that your house is losing anything like that. Nevertheless it is well worth checking how well your loft is insulated. Is there any insulation between the joists supporting the ceiling below? If so how thick is it and what state is it in? Is the loft floor boarded over? Is there any insulation of the roof itself?
You may come the conclusion that you either need insulation or that the existing insulation could do with upgrading. If so you will have no difficulty in finding companies offering to do the job for you – you might well have received mail or cold callers offering their services.
Don’t get suckered in by their sales pitch! However good they may claim their product to be, is it worth it to you ?
Let’s take an example:
If the cost of heating your home over this winter has been say £10 per day then if the heat was on all year that would cost you £3,650 but clearly that will not be the case so let’s assume that you annual bill will balance out at £2,000. Let’s further assume that better insulation could save 20% of this cost – £400. You might feel happy to recover this saving over say 5 years. If so then a spend of £2,000 would mean that after 5 years you would be making a financial saving. This should be the maximum that you spend on loft insulation.
Is that realistic? – It most certainly is. The cost of materials to insulate the loft of an average sized house is between £100 and £200. It should take a trades person no more than 1 day to fit and it is not a skilled job so that should be little more than an additional £200 – £400.
What you may well find is that insulation companies will massively oversell the benefits of their ‘unique’ products and quote £10,000 plus to do the job.
Back to the sums. Based on the above figures of a £400 per year saving it would take 25 years to recover the investment!!. Utter nonsense.
If you decide that you need additional loft insulation then the best thing to do is get some quotes from trusted local trade’s people. Loft insulation is NOT rocket science.
