Are You Insulated?

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If your home is one with unfilled cavities you have the easiest job of all to improve the insulating qualities of your walls with little internal or external disruption. It is advisable to have this work carried out by a professional contractor—it usually takes less than a day for the insulating material to be injected into the walls from the outside. Phone your local Chamber of Commerce for information on contractors able to carry out this work.

External Insulation

The most effective place to install your insulation is on the exterior of your building. It keeps the whole fabric warm and dry, and the contained walls provide the thermal mass that can even out extremes of hot and cold. However, this is also a job most often carried out by specialized firms. The biggest design problems occur at the windows and, here again, it is important to have design advice and not necessarily leave it to the contractors who are installing the insulation.

Internal Insulation

There are many situations where it may not be appropriate to place the insulation on the outside of a building, such as where the brickwork or stonework is particularly attractive. In these cases there is no alternative to installing the insulation on the inside of the external walls. This can be done in two ways:

(a) attaching rigid board insulation to the existing interior wall, then covering it with plasterboard (some plasterboard has insulation already attached);

(b) building a new stud wall against the inside face of the masonry and cutting rigid sheets of plastic foam or fiber batts to fit between the studs, and then covering the studs and insulation with plasterboard. You need to remove and replace architraves around doors and windows need to be removed and replaced after relining.

If you decide to undertake the internal insulating of your external walls, then you have a choice as to whether you do it all at once (probably the cheapest way if you are using a contractor) or install the insulation room by room as you redecorate.

Window Insulation

You can insulate windows at any time, however, it makes sense to do this work in conjunction with wall insulation. It is useful to understand first the reasons why the technique is so effective.

The main principle behind double glazing is trapping an insulating layer of air or other insulating gas between two panes of glass. The ideal gap is between 1/2 and 3/4 of an inch. Increasing this gap does not significantly improve its insulating properties, only the soundproofing. Decreasing this gap leads to a falling off in insulating value. 'there are three other ways of increasing the effectiveness of double-glazing:

Improving the greenhouse properties of the glass—The normal properties of clear glass include its transparency to sunlight and its ability to reflect the longer infrared wavelengths of heat from inside. This reflective quality that keeps the heat in can be further enhanced by the use of special coatings on inner panes.

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