As the weather gets colder, you might be wondering how you can keep your home warm without spending a fortune on energy bills. One way to do this is to insulate your floors.
An uninsulated floor can lose up to 15% of energy if your home’s floor and any upstairs rooms have thermal insulation. According to a study by the National Trust for Energy, insulating your floors can save as much as 65 on heating bills and 290 kg of carbon dioxide yearly. Floor insulation can help to reduce heat loss and make your home more comfortable.
There are a whole lot of cost-effective repair services to choose from if you are experiencing a hot water system-related problem and need a hasty fix. If you don’t have the money to insulate your home, some repairs can be covered beyond your warranty if your system works and you live in the house.
What should I check before installing floor insulation?
It’s worth noting that the installation is a significant undertaking. Thorough planning is necessary, as is familiarity with the materials you’re working with. Installing too much of it will not give you the desired effect; too little, and the floor height may rise, so door frames, skirting boards, window sills, electrical outlets, and electrical wiring will need to be adjusted accordingly.
Building Regulations
Replacing over half of the floor to make sure that you are below 0.25W (m2K) suggests that you have to find an insulating material, even if you did not plan for it. You will probably be able to achieve this with at least 100mm of high-quality foam insulation or 150mm of mineral wool insulation, but this will depend a great deal on the structure of your space.
It is imperative to examine whether the ceiling is insulated in any damp locations to prevent any issues developing, such as mold or decay.
Keep in mind that older homes typically have hardwood floors (floorboards fitted to the joists with a crawl space beneath them), while more recently constructed buildings tend to have a concrete floor. There’s a good opportunity that your cellar or hatch will allow you to see the bottom of the ground, but if that doesn’t happen, you’ll have to pick up the corner of your carpet and underlay.
Quick fixes
One of the easiest ways to take care of heat loss in an insulating underlay or polyfoam board is to place it directly below the carpet. Embedding a multilayer polyethylene underlay in your home will reflect floor heat back into the space, even if you can easily raise the room’s height. Compared to mineral wools or rigid foams, these will charge you more, but they can save you the chore of getting up on your old wooden floor or breaking into a bed of concrete.
When you’re looking for thermal insulation for your floor, make sure your chosen underlay has a high tog or R-value rating (these are both thermal resistance measurements). On the other hand, you’ll need a low thermal resistance for an underfloor heating system, since the underlay will keep the heat of the floor from rising up through the floor.
Beyond the floor, thick carpets and rugs can absorb a good deal of cool air.
Suspended/elevated floors
Some older structures use suspended flooring, where the full amount of a floor is fixed to joists above an open space.
If you have a widespread access to your crawl space below the floor, the job should be rather simple. To apply insulation boards or blankets, the whole distance ought to be no less than 100 mm of rigid foam insulation or 150 mm of blanket insulation. Semi-rigid foil insulation can be adhered using pine battens or lower board battens. Alternatively, blanket insulation can be secured using twine and nails inserted into the joists. Depending upon available area, solid board insulation may be attached to the bottom of joists to supply added consolation and warmth sealing.
Insulating a room without access to below is more time consuming and difficult because it requires removal of the floorboards. Disclosing such a job may be a prudent strategy if you are having home improvements carried out simultaneously.
In conclusion, Underfloor insulation is an extremely effective method of home insulation. It is made up of foams and fibers which act as insulators. Timber floors are traditionally treated with chemicals to prevent them rotting.
