Insulation issues in new build home

MultiFuelBurner

It's more likely not the house and insulation but the heating source. That's the shocking part.

Magnitio

@Panda126 The windows reflect when using a thermal imaging camera, so often don't provide any useful information. Is your house rendered?

You get much better value from using the camera inside the property as per your first set of images. Those images looked to show missing loft insulation. Do you have access to the loft to check?

TheElectricCow

MultiFuelBurner said:

I believe the scale is important there the top is 3.6oC/5.8oC that's not as glowingly hot as the pictures may suggest. 

(I may be wrong here so correct me someone if this is the case)

I’d agree with this, the images seem to suggest that even the hottest parts of the house (“leaking” the most heat) are still only a few degrees hotter than the rest of the building and not above 6c. 

The camera appears to searching for the coldest spot in each picture, which happens to be the sky in this case, and so that’s what the temperature of the glowing spots are being compared against. The camera has read the temperature of the sky as below -40c in each case, so naturally anything set against temperatures that low may seem quite warm in comparison. We can see some parts certainly are hotter than others, but at this scale it’s difficult to tell exactly how much hotter/colder each area is.

I’d suggest taking the same pictures again but avoiding getting the sky in the frame would help get a more accurate view of the exact temperature difference between different areas of the house, especially in relation to the windows/roof.

peter3hg

jimjames said:

FreeBear said:

Panda126 said: Our house is losing heat ridiculously fast, for example we can heat up a room up to 20C. The moment we turn off the radiators our temperature starts to drop. We calculated that it is dropping by 0.5C every 20-25 minutes.

For a new build, that is terrible and more than twice the temperature drop I get in a late 1920s semi. Last night, the temperature outside was around -1°C, and I experienced a drop of about 0.39°C per hour (went from 20.5°C to17.8°C in 7 hours).

Our house is similar (1930s) at 0.44C per hour so I agree that it's shocking a new build would be worse. It's very noticeable that our extension built in the last 10 years is warmer than the main house so I would expect new build to be same. 

These figures very much depend on location of where the temperature is being measured from. The upstairs zone in my house with the current cold temperatures will drop about 1.5°C in the 9.5 hours the heating is on setback whereas the downstairs with the thermostat in the hallway may drop nearly twice that in the same time period.

QrizB

TheElectricCow said:

MultiFuelBurner said:

I believe the scale is important there the top is 3.6oC/5.8oC that's not as glowingly hot as the pictures may suggest. 

(I may be wrong here so correct me someone if this is the case)

I’d agree with this, the images seem to suggest that even the hottest parts of the house (“leaking” the most heat) are still only a few degrees hotter than the rest of the building and not above 6c. 

The camera appears to searching for the coldest spot in each picture, which happens to be the sky in this case, and so that’s what the temperature of the glowing spots are being compared against. The camera has read the temperature of the sky as below -40c in each case, so naturally anything set against temperatures that low may seem quite warm in comparison. We can see some parts certainly are hotter than others, but at this scale it’s difficult to tell exactly how much hotter/colder each area is.

I’d suggest taking the same pictures again but avoiding getting the sky in the frame would help get a more accurate view of the exact temperature difference between different areas of the house, especially in relation to the windows/roof.

These were my thoughts, too, and I'm not going to write a long post just to repeat them!

Panda126

Thanks all will try to get some better photos after sunset. 
As for the insulation the photos were taken downstairs on the ground floor which suggest lack of insulation so it's difficult to see if there's anything without drilling the holes. We'll try to look through some of the spot lights to inspect if we can see anything.

RelievedSheff

jimjames said:

FreeBear said:

Panda126 said: Our house is losing heat ridiculously fast, for example we can heat up a room up to 20C. The moment we turn off the radiators our temperature starts to drop. We calculated that it is dropping by 0.5C every 20-25 minutes.

For a new build, that is terrible and more than twice the temperature drop I get in a late 1920s semi. Last night, the temperature outside was around -1°C, and I experienced a drop of about 0.39°C per hour (went from 20.5°C to17.8°C in 7 hours).

Our house is similar (1930s) at 0.44C per hour so I agree that it's shocking a new build would be worse. It's very noticeable that our extension built in the last 10 years is warmer than the main house so I would expect new build to be same. 

The OP was previously only heating one room so a lot of the "heat loss" will be to unheated areas of the house.

Our "new build" (it's almost five years old now) retains it's heat incredibly well which is great at this time of the year but not so great come mid summer!

Panda126

We're heating the whole house, we have all radiators on. We're just having radiators set on higher temperatures where we spend most of the time. This morning I set all rooms on 20 for 2-3 hours. Then reduced the temperature to 18 in the rooms we don't use. Otherwise the bill would come up to £20+ a day.

I have my office set on 20 since 9am. The utility is next to my office with radiator on for a few hours too and it's just above 16C. It was around 10 in the morning there. I think it's the worst room. I'm planning to turn it off soon to measure how fast it'll drop and I will post my results here.

MultiFuelBurner

I believe in your previous thread on your house it was pointed out that the heaters you have are likely not powerful enough to heat your home and the most costly form of heating there is.

It is not the insulation but the heating that is the issue and one of the comments suggested you club together with other house owners (probably a good time if they are all burning through £20 a day) and present the issues to the builder.

A cheap was round this may be for the builders to fit air to air multi split heat pump systems to your houses. At the very least they could take care of the fitting if you all club together.

Most people will be using the most energy to heat their home for the year so far due to the temperatures across the UK currently.

Oscarmax

Panda126 said:

Hi everyone, some time ago I raised an issue about our electric radiators as we were not able to keep our new house warm.

We did a couple of tests, and we figured out that there might be another issue which is the insulation.

Our house is losing heat ridiculously fast, for example we can heat up a room up to 20C. The moment we turn off the radiators our temperature starts to drop. We calculated that it is dropping by 0.5C every 20-25 minutes. And with the radiators off the temperature will keep dropping constantly (the lowest we saw so far was about 6C – yes, 6C inside the house with all doors, windows and vents closed)

As you can imagine our bills are very high, and this is with living in a house that is never warm no matter how much we spend on heating.

As it’s a new build house, built last year we never expected anything like this.

We contacted developer who can’t see any issue and told us the house is well insulated.

We continued to look closer at the issue. We invested in Topdon TC005 thermal camera, and what we saw shocked us.

It seems that we have a lot of cold spots in the house which from my understanding might suggest poor insulation, or no insulation at all. All outside walls seems to be very cold (they’re super cold when we touch them as well) but there’s a lot of cold spots in the ceilings as well.

I’m attaching photo of some examples of the cold spots we located in our house.

Does anyone have any experience with poor insulation in new build houses? Can someone advise me if we’re right thinking that the insulation is an issue in our home?

In 2017 we purchased a new detached bungalow, the wall cavities were supposed to be foam filled, we had to have several on the external brick replaced, we noted in places the foam insulation was missing, fitting the TV ariel in the loft we noticed the majority of the insulation was missing, the service valves were missing on most of the appliance, they fitted TRV valves on radiator near the thermostats, the majority of the electric sockets and light fittings had no earth insulation wire, the list was exhaustive.

The previous site manager was not up to the job, fortunately I was a building surveyor and had a good working relationship with the new site manager, I read the builder the riot act, the builder promptly apologised and put everything right.