Work on the house is ongoing and I have been looking at ways of adding extra insulation into the house without taking the walls down. I think if we are going to do the major insulation work it will have to wait for the summer. However we took a picture of the house in the recent snow which was useful for pinpointing areas where the heat was escaping.
The back of the house showed a lot less snow on certain sections:
Particularly under the window section and to the left and right of the windows. The loft was recently insulated under a government grant scheme so was pretty good at retaining heat. The easiest way to get insulation in here was to lift the tiles (they are all interconnected) and put in new insulation. When we did this we discovered some old insulation, this had been installed about 25 years before and as well as being pretty thin by today’s standards had been used for nesting by squirrels! We decided it was best to take this out and start again, luckily there is a lot of government sponsored insulation available at the moment made from recycled bottles so we had plenty of cheap stuff to replace it with. We have managed the right hand side of the house so far and will begin work on the rest when there is a nice dry weekend and some scaffolding available, temperatures in the house have again increased after this work.
Part three: green roofs
The next step is to work on a green roof. We photographed this large area during the snow:
You can see a lot of heat is escaping where the boiler outlet and the skylight are. We think a green roof will provide an attractive and eco friendly form of insulation. There is a smaller flat roof on the other side of the house that we plan to experiment with first before tackling this one. May take until the summer but will update when I can
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