Cold bathroom advice

cosh25

I have been renovating a property for the past 9 months and moved in around 2 weeks ago.

The house is a mid terraced 1900 cottage with the bathroom at the rear of the property. Its was completely ripped out and redone with full tiles. The main wall is external and since I have moved in the condensation is unbelievable and you can’t get the room warm. Its putting me off using it and the other night my extractor fan short fused due to the moisture in it so I am unable to use it. I am opening the window when using the shower, but if its on for 2 minutes or more the steam build up is nothing like I have seen before. The walls are solid brick so no cavity and I do plan getting the external walls rendered, but this won’t provide much insulation.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions as I am all internet searched out. Thanks in adavance!

tacpot12

I think you will need a combination of solutions: 

1. some insulation for the walls; this can be internal or external, but my guess is that if you've recently paid for the bathroom to be tiled, you won't want to remove all the tiles to install internal wall insulation, so it will have to go on the outside. If the bathroom is on the ground floor and has a flat roof this is much easier to extend the roof so that it covers the insulation on the outside of the walls properly. 
2. a bigger radiator (or a radiator) to heat the room;you need the room to be hot when you take a shower, so that the walls are warm and condensation doesn't form on them. You want the water vapour to remain as vapour so that the third solution can play its part.
3. a bigger extractor fan that is controlled by a humidistat - I had similar problems in the same sort of property, and managed to solve it just using solutions 2 and 3, but with fan, I had to be creative about how it was ducted so that it was able to collect all the moist air from above the shower.

With these solutions in place, you should be able to leave the window shut, and not have the problem. 

Doozergirl

tacpot12 said:

I think you will need a combination of solutions: 

1. some insulation for the walls; this can be internal or external, but my guess is that if you've recently paid for the bathroom to be tiled, you won't want to remove all the tiles to install internal wall insulation, so it will have to go on the outside. If the bathroom is on the ground floor and has a flat roof this is much easier to extend the roof so that it covers the insulation on the outside of the walls properly. 
2. a bigger radiator (or a radiator) to heat the room;you need the room to be hot when you take a shower, so that the walls are warm and condensation doesn't form on them. You want the water vapour to remain as vapour so that the third solution can play its part.
3. a bigger extractor fan that is controlled by a humidistat - I had similar problems in the same sort of property, and managed to solve it just using solutions 2 and 3, but with fan, I had to be creative about how it was ducted so that it was able to collect all the moist air from above the shower.

With these solutions in place, you should be able to leave the window shut, and not have the problem. 

I can't add much to this.  These are your key points.  

You can use the heating calculator on the Best Heating website and work out exactly what your heating need is for the room. We've had a recent conversation here and I think we're all agreed that the standard chrome towel heater has nowhere near enough BTU output for the average British home. 

And a lesson - next time you renovate a house, insulation is your starting point!  

FreeBear

cosh25 said: The house is a mid terraced 1900 cottage with the bathroom at the rear of the property. Its was completely ripped out and redone with full tiles. ... The walls are solid brick so no cavity and I do plan getting the external walls rendered, but this won’t provide much insulation.

I'm guessing that you used a cement based tile adhesive along with a glazed tile - This will have destroyed the ability for the solid brick wall to "breath" internally, so any moisture in the wall will have to get out through the external surface. If you are going to render the outside, use a pure lime render and not something like K-Rend - Don't use modern paints on it either. Both will trap moisture in the wall and cause problems in the future. A damp wall is a cold wall.

You could fix woodwool or cork boards to the outside (with a lime render over the top). That would help to keep some of the heat in and also retain the ability for the wall to breath.

cosh25

Thanks for the advice and comments. Will spend some time this weekend looking into them!

Wes121708

We've got this exact same problem. Our walk in shower has all external walls and none are cavity walls. We also have a small towel rail which doesn't even touch it, it's freezing cold. We have an extractor in the shower itself which seems to work if we keep the window shut. If the window is open, because the air is so cold it makes it worse.
We had it done in the summer which is lovely when it's hot outside, standing on the cold tile floor. Think we'll see this winter through and change the towel rail for a radiator.