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Lava and String Vests

Following on from my first article last month I promised to bring you positive actions you can take to reduce your carbon emissions.

This month I start with the cheapest way to bring about an energy efficient home, other than turning appliances off when you are not using them, insulation. Boring I know but why spend loads of your hard earned cash on fancy technologies when the simplest are the most cost effective and need doing first.

You wouldn’t turn up the central heating in winter when wearing a tee shirt without first putting on a jumper now would you?

Construction types have varied over the last couple of hundred years. The majority of us live in houses, which are less than 200 years old. During this period houses started off with solid walls, usually very thick, made from flint, stone and later, brick. They had thatched roofs or clay roof tiles. Later houses were made of brick and tile and then around 1930 cavity walls were introduced. Not all houses had them but this change was primarily to do with creating separation between two walls to prevent damp penetrating the inner wall.

By 1950 most house were of cavity wall construction. This cavity was not only a physical separation but also like a string vest contained air, which had modest insulation properties. A 1950’s house is much warmer than a Victorian one 50 years its senior for this reason.

During the 1960’s cavity wall insulation started to become popular despite its high cost. Believe it or not cavity wall insulation was a similar price to a Ford Capri! However liquid foam was sometimes used and eventually this was found to allow damp to cross to the internal walls, it also could leach toxic gases shortly after installation. Thankfully Ester Rantzen on the That’s Life television programme saw the end to that particular material being used. It did however damage the potential good that cavity wall brings by creating a stigma.

Nowadays bonded polystyrene beads, cellulose fibre, Rockwool, Instafibre and sheep’s wool are used. As a general rule of thumb Rockwool or Instafibre is retrospectively installed into cavity walls. It is made of lava rock which is cooled and spun to create a loose filled material which is chemically inert, does not transmit water and traps air, like a string vest, to create its insulating properties. It looks like loft insulation but is not in rolls. It is blown, under pressure through a pipe and nozzle through 22mm holes in the walls equally spaced to ensure a constant fill density.

Polystyrene beads can also be retrospectively installed but they need the bonding to be correctly carried out to ensure that when you drill a hole through a wall or change your windows you don’t get a snowstorm! The cellulose fibre (recycled paper) and sheep’s wool is a little more specialised and in the wools case usually only used in new build.

In 1995 legislation was passed to ensure that all newly built properties, including extensions and renovations, had to have cavity wall insulation fitted. Over 5 million households have now had cavity wall insulation installed, excluding new build. The memory of problems seems to still remain however, as I regular encounter householders who believe that cavity wall insulation creates damp in their homes and devalues their property. Quite the reverse is true, houses which suffer damp problems usually loose the problem if cavity wall insulation is installed.

Equally from mid 2007 anybody selling their house will have to provide a Home Buyers Pack to their potential buyer. In this pack you will need to have an Energy Performance Certificate. If you have cavity wall insulation, loft insulation, a condensing boiler, a central heating programmer and thermostatic radiator valves then your house will cost less to run and therefore attract a higher rating, much like fridges have an A to G rating and cars have a miles per gallon figure.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you then a government backed Cavity wall Insulation Guarantee Association (CIGA) will provide you with a 25 year guarantee which is backed by millions of pounds of insurance. Basically for each installation the installer pays a fee to CIGA and this money as just grown and grown, probably because very few people have needed to claim.

So if you are lucky enough to have cavity walls and they are not filled then why not take advantage of the grants that are currently available to everyone, without exception. You can’t use the ‘only people on benefits get help’ excuse on this one. In my experience over the last 7 years everyone gets at least a 50% discount. Gas prices have gone up and will continue to do so. Who can afford £1,000 a year or more in fuel bills?

Cavity wall insulation will reduce the heat escaping through your walls by 35%. Furthermore if your loft needs insulating then there are grants for that too! Usually lofts tend to have some insulation and householders tend to think that is sufficient. New homes are fitted with 270mm or 11 inches.

In this case size does matter, if your loft has less than 6 inches then get yourself a loft top up grant, save money and do your bit. Loft insulation isn’t made from glass fibre or asbestos any more so you are unlikely to get allergy or asthma related problems if that’s your worry.

30% of heat loss is through the loft and roof. So if you want to save money so you can afford to stay warm as the winters get colder but also keep your home cool during hotter summers then get insulated. The more energy you use the more power stations need to use coal and gas, and the more likely we are to need nuclear power stations to satisfy our energy demand.

Ring your local council’s energy efficiency officer or the Energy Saving Trust who can tell which grant schemes are best. And for all you sceptics out there the money comes for a commitment placed on energy supply companies, typically the 7 with the most customers. They have to allocate funds to provide the grants schemes. But you don’t have to be with a particular company to get their grant scheme.

We can all access all grant schemes but don’t take my word for it ask one of the 5 million households who have had cavity wall insulation.