Insulation for solid walls

yorksguy11

As my house is a stone built terrace built in around 1840 it has solid walls which mean i cant have cavity wall insulation.
I wondered if there was any alternative. The only one iv been told about is fitting a studded wall up against the outer walls to create a cavity. But thats out of the question as the rooms are small now
My main problem is damp on the walls facing the outside

roses

I already looked into this but there is no way to insulate solid walls other than having a second wall put up. I have a Victorian terraced & here is what I had done:

- thermostatic valves fitted on the radiators
- skirting replaced. The previous skirting was full of cracks & when it was removed, it was attached directly to the brickwork. I had this plastered over & new skirting fitted. This helped a lot as it blocked up all gaps where cold air was coming through & there is now "a layer of insulation" at the bottom of the wall. It wasn't cheap though but as I was getting several rooms redecorated, it was worth doing at the time. It has made a difference.
- loft insulation
- double glazing

HugoSP

As the previous poster says, look at your loft insulation. Ideally it should be in the region of 10 inches. Pound to a penny it's 2 or 4.

To stud and dry line the walls would lose you some 4 to 6 inches of space in each dimension of the room max, (work on 2 to 3 inches deep on each wall).

Howecer, a lot of people forget that with stome build terraces the internal plaster/render can be up to 4 inches thick in places, so if this were to be hacked off, then dry lined and insulated it is quite possible that a 6 inch loss could be reduced to 3 inches.

baby-mechanic

Once we'd made sure our walls were dry, we put up polystyrene 'wallpaper':

http://www.wickes.co.uk/invt/219990?htxt=6YwZAISW1i5OgIudElUVh4%2BI3KMD0YlK3aWM7EPIBJQVvJOxcInvY1H4JwBcSZ2MIfCIMv2VNq1z%0AWJ9bQPNXrg%3D%3D

and then pasted the thickest lining paper available on top of it.

tartan_guru

Our Victorian House has been dry lined with thermal plasterboard (ie plasterboard with 10mm of polystyrene insulation behind). There is a 10mm airgap behind so the total thickness is about 30mm is total (an inch and a bit).

The attached house next door which has also been lined (refurbished at the same time) has just been sold - the energy report in the HIP indicated that it was top of the C rating; more energy efficient than many modern houses, not bad for a 110 year old house! Compared to our other neighbours houses which haven't been lined, it makes a massive difference in terms of costs and general comfort. We use about a third less gas heating a three bed house than we did heating an uninsulated 2 bedroom victorian flat.

Dry lining does have it's issues though:

1. You loose space (but not as much as you may think)
2. You do lose the original finishes, however in our case the walls were apparently fairly shot in the first place and most of the original feature had been lost over the years any way.

I should also mention that we do have 270mm of loft insulation as well, which really should be your first port of call (as previous posters have mentioned). Also we had the benefit of buying a place which had already had the work done, so not sure what it is like to actually have installed.