We bought our new house in January with the intention of ‘greening’ it as a retirement project. We’d been reading resources such as the Green Building Magazine, the Green Building Bible, T-Zero, the Energy Saving Trust, etc. High on the list was improving the insulation of the walls. The house was built in the 1920s, with an unusual external timber frame construction (see the photo), and the walls are a mere 6 inches or so thick.

All the experts suggesr that the best way to go for this sort of house is external wall insulation (EWI) – like putting a tea cosy on a tea pot – and our house would appear to be perfect for this treatment. One of our neighbours’ houses has had its walls ‘thickened’ in the past, presumably by EWI (the work was done before the present owners bought the house). There are a number of proprietary products on the market, and the work would appear to be easily within the grasp of the average local builder.

Unfortunately, trying to find someone accredited to carry out the work is proving difficult. You can find installers’ websites which claim they do EWI, but a phone call shows they actually only do cavity wall insulation. The government is pouring grant money into cavity wall insulation, so the suspicion must be that installers have decided to concentrate where easy money is to be made.

Given that 1 in 4 homes in the UK have solid walls, this would appear to be a very short sighted approach. Our quest continues … watch this space.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.