Property Tips by Chartered Surveyors from the Haynes House Manual series
Newsflash: 30,000 homes fitted with botched insulation under Government schemes
Next month the long awaited new edition of the highly acclaimed Home Insulation Manual will be published. The books shows the right way to fit insulation to your home to cut energy bills and make your home warm and comfortable.
Coincidentally the BBC are reporting that as many as 30,000 homes fitted with botched insulation under government schemes.
They say that “homes have been left at risk of damp and mould due to poorly installed insulation”. Persistent damp in properties can also of course lead to rot in structural timbers.
Energy Consumer Minister, Miatta Fahnbulleh, described the failures as “systemic,” urging affected households to “contact Ofgem for support”. Which sounds rather like a typical politician’s passing the buck exercise, although to be fair the schemes in question were carried out under the previous (incompetent) administration.
Many of these schemes were carried out with very little monitoring by private contractors appointed by corporate energy companies who were legally required to meet government targets for retro-fitting.
Once again this sort of ‘light-touch regulation’ so beloved by politicians is an invitation for cowboy firms to do a bad job and pocket the money. Echoes of Grenfell Tower.
In our experience as Chartered Surveyors some of the worst offenders when it comes to serious insulation problems are where cavity wall insulation (CWI) has been incompetently applied, and spray foam applied in lofts to roof slopes, which despite being heavily advertised can potentially make your home unmortgageable.
But it appears that in these cases the type of insulation causing most problems is internal and external wall insulation (IWI and EWI).
The correct way to fit insulation is shown in detail in the new Home Insulation Manual.
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Ian Rock’s Rightsurvey property tips are taken from the Haynes House Manual series.
