New home is very cold!

love_lifer

have you got laminate floors? they make rooms very cold. carpets are much better for insulation, rugs help

mrs_baggins

Hi, I do sympathise with you!!! My house was built in 1991 and I have never been warm in it!! dont know what it is but I dont suppose its helped by laminate flooring downstairs. With ref to cavity wall insulation as others have said I bet you already have it. I contacted one of the grant agents and they came out and I was willing to pay £150 to get it warmer but after drilling an exploratory hole it turns out I already have it. Shame! My house was built by a well known company here which likes to economise and reckon they must have! We have a chimney with a gas fire which is mainly for effect only so have now resorted to shoving balls of newspaper up the chimney as there was a teriffic draught coming down it. I have all the insulated walls etc but its just never warm! or perhaps its just me!

Avoriaz

Surely any recently built home has decent cavity wall insulation. There have been regulations governing insulation standards for decades.

We have had two extensions built, in 1987 and 1993 and on both occasions I could see the bricklayer putting thick sheets of insulation in the cavity as he built the walls. These sheets pretty well filled the cavity gap and I can’t imagine that thinner sheets are either available or would be cheaper and tempt the builder to skimp on it. The cost of insulation sheets must be a tiny proportion of the total cost and as they are so obvious during the building, no builder is going to risk falling foul of the building inspector or home owner.

In addition, modern building practice is often to use bricks for the outer skin and thermo blocks for the inner skin of the wall. These blocks themselves offer better heat insulation than bricks.

It might be possible to get a good idea of what is in your cavity by going up in the loft and finding a place where you can see the top of the cavity. Just don’t put a foot through your bedroom ceiling.:rotfl:

apples1

When our heating thermostats say 15 degrees it is actually nothing like 15 degrees. The numbers just don't tally with reality although the heating works fine. We just had to ignore the numbers and find our ideal room temperature by trial & error and leave the thermostat dial set at that level no matter what number it reads! We had a room thermometer which we got when our daugher was a baby and used that to see what the real temp was just to reassure ourselves we weren't totally mad.

i appreciate this is unlikely to be your problem but have you tried putting the thermostat up (even higher than 27!!). If you set it to 35 or something and your own thermometer next to it goes up to 18 or 20 you may be sorted.

pinkpixie_2

Thanks everyone!We're going to call the company who built the house to ask about the cavity walls and see if there's something in there already. Will look into getting loft insulation.We've found a thing on the boiler to turn it up now (thanks Avoriaz) so hopefully that will make some difference. It did get abit warmer in some rooms last night after that but some areas were still cold. No laminate flooring, although we were planning on putting some down!! (will be radically rethinking that one now!).Merry Christmas to you all!Pink Pixie

roswell

go round the outside fo the house and look for any gaps into the house eg plumbing work through the walls and cover any cracks / gaps with somethign liek silicone sealer or new mortor.

do you have double glazing ? is there any drafts for the windows ? if you close the doors to each room are there any rooms that remain paticularly cold ?

If you smoke (This doesnt make the house colder) but hold a lit ciggy to windows / door frames and the smoke will indicate drafts and which direction they are going.

do you have underfelt under your carpets?

tawnyowls

Avoriaz wrote:

Surely any recently built home has decent cavity wall insulation. There have been regulations governing insulation standards for decades.

But the point is, what's 'decent'? We do have some cavity wall insulation, but it doesn't fill the entire cavity - there's just enough to have it comply with the building regulation at the time, even though it's far short of the most recent ones. The problem is (and it took a lot of research to find this out) is that the machines that are used to blow the insulation into the walls are calibrated on a totally empty cavity, so if you have some CWI in there, even if it's not enough and it's beginning to break down and everything else, it's enough to prevent the insulation people using their machines. It's a total pain, and most people would be better off if the walls had never been insulated at all, as they could then call in people to do the job properly.

Moneymaker

We had a laminated floor fitted. It came with a silver-backed insulating layer that was put down first. Doesn't feel cold but we do have wooden floorboards beneath, not concrete. We had rockwool put in the cavity walls ages ago. But additional loft insulation made the most obvious difference. We now have to leave the bedroom windows open or we roast!

Avoriaz

apples1 wrote:

When our heating thermostats say 15 degrees it is actually nothing like 15 degrees. The numbers just don't tally with reality although the heating works fine. ....

Try gently removing the dial from the spindle or shaft and replacing it in the right position so that it reads the correct temperature.

If the shaft is splined or grooved this will be easy. If the shaft is a half circle you might have to fiddle with the fitting in the dial.

If you cannot do that, use paint or a felt pen or similar to mask the existing marker and paint a new marker in the correct position.;)

Moneymaker

My thermostat is only marked down to 40 degrees. Normally I set it at 65. I think it would be jolly cold at 15 degrees!