Help Keeping My House Warm

*~Zephyr~*

I once lived in a house that had a flat roof, so lots of heat was lost through the bedroom ceilings. We tried everything we could to keep it warm.

My best tip is definitely the curtains. Thick as possible and covering every window and door.

Our front door opened into the dining room and the entire front wall was either door or window - lots and lots of glass. We put a curtain pole up across the entire wall and bought thick curtains to cover the lot. Luckily, the room wasn't overly wide and a pair of 90"x 90" heavy lined curtains from Argos fitted perfectly. It made a HUGE amount of difference. I bought another pair for the back door too and the house was much, much warmer.

If your curtains are a bit thin and you haven't got much money to splash about, buy some cheap fleece blankets and tack them to the back of your existing curtains - it will make a lot of difference.

Furts

brooklyn07 wrote: »

i don't know if this is feasible for you at all but I recently purchased a property and the walls in the bedrooms are really bad and ideally need replastering but I can't afford that.


I purchased some polystyrene insulated lining paper for 5 quid a roll, and although I didn't buy it for insulating purposes, just to hide all the cracks and uneven walls, the entire room feels a lot warmer now that its up

I suggest this procedure is followed with ones eyes open to all aspects, and not just energy saving. Under the Building Regulations one has to consider surface spread of flame on walls and ceilings. Hence timber cladding can be a failure as can oil based paint finishes.

Polystyrene ceiling tiles were fashionable in the 1960s but the fire injuries were horrendous. Putting polystyrene on walls is also taking a risk.

brooklyn07

Furts wrote: »

I suggest this procedure is followed with ones eyes open to all aspects, and not just energy saving. Under the Building Regulations one has to consider surface spread of flame on walls and ceilings. Hence timber cladding can be a failure as can oil based paint finishes.

Polystyrene ceiling tiles were fashionable in the 1960s but the fire injuries were horrendous. Putting polystyrene on walls is also taking a risk.

Really? then why is it so readily available in DIY shops?


Maybe they've changed it slightly then as this stuff I use says contains fire retardants?

jonnyb1978

How powerful are your radiators. I have done the same thing. Stripped back Windows. Re sealed them etc. Mainly to tart them up, but a big problem apart from what's mentioned above are your radiators. It does not matter how hot they get if there is not enough heat coming into your rooms.

Type btu calculator into google and insert your room measurements then compare with your type and size of existing radiator.
I've just found 2000btu in our dining room. We need at least 5000.
Same for the bathroom and Ensuite. We only getting half the heat needed.

psychic_teabag

I think you can get small fans which force additional air past radiators to increase the power. Could just try an experiment blowing a small fan at or away from the radiator.

You can get foil to put behind radiators - I'm a little dubious about the science of using foil, but I have put some old wallpaper behind radiators on external walls to reduce the heat going into the brickwork.

psychic_teabag

Can often find curtains in charity shops : we recently started looking, and quite quickly found a very thick lined pair that perfectly fitted our landing window, and an (unlined) pair that we used to double-up the insulation over the front door.

27col

psychic_teabag wrote: »

I think you can get small fans which force additional air past radiators to increase the power. Could just try an experiment blowing a small fan at or away from the radiator.

You can get foil to put behind radiators - I'm a little dubious about the science of using foil, but I have put some old wallpaper behind radiators on external walls to reduce the heat going into the brickwork.

If wall paper had the slightest insulating effect then there would be absolutely no need for cavity wall insulation. Ridiculous idea.
The idea of foil behind a radiator is to reflect heat back into the room. Rather than letting it pass into the fabric of the wall. However, if the wall has cavity insulation then most of the heat will stay inside the house because the rate of transference is reduced by the insulation.
Also, it does not matter how much air you push past a radiator. It is only capable of producing an certain amount of heat. Which mainly depends on the temperature and rate of flow of the water passing through it.

psychic_teabag

27col wrote: »

If wall paper had the slightest insulating effect then there would be absolutely no need for cavity wall insulation. Ridiculous idea.
The idea of foil behind a radiator is to reflect heat back into the room. Rather than letting it pass into the fabric of the wall. However, if the wall has cavity insulation then most of the heat will stay inside the house because the rate of transference is reduced by the insulation.
Also, it does not matter how much air you push past a radiator. It is only capable of producing an certain amount of heat. Which mainly depends on the temperature and rate of flow of the water passing through it.

From http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4964845_house-radiator-work.html radiators actually work more by convection than by heat radiation.

Foil would be fine to reduce radiation losses to the walls, but if it's attached to the wall, it will still conduct heat into the wall. My paper is free-floating with an air-gap, and so doesn't do that. I still prefer to heat up the air in the room than the inner layer of bricks immediately behind the radiator.

Similarly, yes, a fan is absolutely no use in increasing radiation heat. But since we're actually conducting heat to the air passing over the "radiatior", increasing the air flow works very well indeed. The fan inside a computer certainly increases the rate at which is transferred from the cpu heatsink to the surroundings.

trailingspouse

Is the house damp at all? Dampness will suck the heat out of a house quicker than anything.

Also, do you know the actual temperature of the rooms? It's an old-fashioned idea, but thick socks and a woolly jumper can work wonders (I agree that the house should be comfortable to live in, but an old house is an old house, and back in the day people just didn't expect to be as warm as we do these days.)

DavidJonas

We used to have a house just like this.

Insulate the loft. That will help a lot.

You might consider replacing the front and back doors if you are losing a lot of heat from there (?). We used to get a gale of a draught from our old wooden front door, even with a draught excluder.

But you need some ventilation. Having moved from that draughty end of terrace into a cosy, well insulated semi, we got the opposite problem. Condensation!