bighouseproblems

As title suggests. I understand if an article 4 has been issued you need planning permission. If not falls under permitted development. But it does say if installed on a wall facing a highway you will need planning permission. I will be installing on the roof not the walls......... I am hopeful this is not some weird wording and roofs are not classed as walls ha???

Vapour Open buildup is obviously the right way to go. I was merely offering the list of buildups commonly debated by people with solid walls. I did not imply any of the vapour barrier systems were correct. I find debating a subject and stressing it's validity constructive. I like solving problems...... So even if I fully intend to go down the route of wood fibre and lime plaster i like the idea of testing the theory against the other solutions. I can throw 30K at my walls no problems but others may be less fortunate and need a more cost effective solution. I have seen many posts with people who have a great deal of experience in these matters such as yourself steamytea, Jayc89 and others.

Hi Roger, As i said i know the right option, Just amusing my mind and wondering what research has been done into a good heat source in a wall and the impacts of them.

Hi Nod, If needs must then it will be Lime Plaster in all 8 rooms potentially on 16 external walls. I have estimated the cost will around £26K. If I can mitigate the risk then this cost will be significantly reduced of course. One issue I have with Vapour barrier is ensuring the work is done to the highest standard. I would love to do the work myself but as it stands im not sure if i will have the time.

The walls and ceilings would be plastered with gypsum thus creating an airtight barrier. Just to clarify i am not trying to reinvent the wheel or avoid using the correct products on a period property. as it stands woodfibre and lime plaster is the default. I am simply playing devils advocate in my mind and exploring the potential drying of a heat source and would it mitigate the risks etc.

Solid Sandstone - Painted which will be removed Solid Brick Rear - Painted which will be removed Somewhere around 9Inch without measuring. On the front wall the sandstone is wet through the winter months and dries out through summer. There is a missing section of paint which i look at everyday to see what it is doing. The wood burner has been running for 3-4 days now and it is almost bone dry. Ventilation is minimal but we open the back door around 30 times a day. We have hygrometers in every room and since installing triple glazing the humidity has dropped to around 40%, 50% at worst.

Hi Temp, Thanks for the link however I am aware of all the different buildup types. What I have not come across in my research is how a heat source directly warming the wall will play a part of the effects of condensation etc. Regards

So there are some people on here which have spent much longer than I have working out these things and would like your opinions. This is the time old question which has been gone over a thousand times.......... However I want to throw in a dynamic variable into the equation. So I have a solid wall property. Sandstone front-Solid Brick rear. Insulation mockup is 1. Wood fibre board and lime plaster with airtightness tapes as best as possible. 2. Mineral Wool and Plasterboard with Cavity. 3. Mineral Wool and Plasterboard without Cavity. 4. Mineral Wool and Plasterboard with Cavity and vapour barrier. 5. Mineral Wool and Plasterboard without cavity and vapour barrier. So the dynamic variable is as follows - I have just installed a wood burner and it is clear that since then the walls are dramatically dryer. on one side of the property. It is our intentions to install a rayburn on the other side thus having to forms of heat on both side walls. This may also increase to another burner in a third room downstairs. The point of this post is to establish whether this would mitigate the risk of interstitial condensation behind the insulation to the point of not requiring a vapour barrier which makes the process of insulation more complicated combined with fixings and punctures etc. I am off to the googles to try and find some info on this but I was hopeful some clever people on here had been through this scenario and worked out some physics already. ****Wood Fibre and Lime would be my preference given a money no object approach however i have to balance the risk against cost if i can *****

Hi All, I am in the process of putting together a project plan to renovate our house. As part of it I am strongly considering a Solar Array on a south facing roof. This roof faces a highway in a conservation area. It must be noted a property close by has solar and falls within the conservation area also. My main question is how much hassle is it putting a planning application together. I have a thousand different things to work on to do with the project itself, I am wondering whether a planning consultancy would make my life much easier. Thanks In advance for any advice.

I will design out this suggestion as I believe this was one original plans with the kitchen and other front room having double glass doors facing each other to provide more light to the hallway and give the feeling the rooms were connected when the doors were open. My only stumbling block with this is management (wife) is not so keen on knocking walls through.

So from the layout as much future proofing has been included. The front left room would be our daughters lounge for when she is a teenager and has friends over. She would have access to the kitchen and bathroom. There is a middle door across the hallway before the back area which my wife and I could close over and sit in our lounge in relative peace. Cat 6 cable would be great however with the improvements in WiFi and currently using power lines we do not have any issues streaming through firesticks or TV etc. We also work from home over WiFi with no problems. Our doorways are currently 850mm wide so accessible for most wheelchairs.

So budget is loose but I am not trying to reinvent the wheel. 1918 Georgian Style House. Two Adults 1 toddler 1 cat and a dog. We have capacity for guests but currently do not entertain as such but may change in the future. We have 4 bedrooms upstairs so 2 guest rooms. Noise from internal is not bad but during renovations insulation will be placed between floors. Our main bedrooms are at the rear of the property another reason to move the kitchen to the front. Kitchen Light will be vastly improved. Ventilation will be provided via 3 tilt and turn windows. I have attached a redesign of the layout.

Hi Papillon, The back hallway is where the staircase is. The hallway is just over a meter wide from front to back and the staircase comes down to face the back left room. I had thought about blocking up the rear door and using that space plus what is under the stairs to have the bathroom however it would mean bricking up the doorway relocating the boiler and potentially the consumer board under the cupboard. Plus it would cut out light for the hallway. Ignore the flue liner ha. Also we will have two lounges a kitchen and the utility room when finished.

I am in the process of trying to nail down the layout for our property. To give some context the front of the property is south facing but their is no front garden and sits directly on a footpath before some parking bays and then the road. The traffic is relatively low volume however we do have large trucks and some speed bumps so even with triple glazing some noise makes it way into our lounges currently at the front of the property. My proposal is to move the Kitchen currently back left in the pictures attached to the Front Right. This will enable us to utilise the natural light from the 3 windows and move the lounge to back left. The area in the pictures attached which is back right is currently or was an ensuite which currently serves as a utility room/bathroom. i would like to redesign this area to have a separate toilet and shower room and then a utility/boot room. Currently we have waste and hot and cold feeds in all 3 corners aside from the doorway. any input is welcome. I am trying to avoid moving the toilet away from this room as we have all the services in there and can't see an issue accessing the toilet from the kitchen. Thanks in Advance.

This is the exact method I have landed on. I will most likely use the adhesive and mechanicals with the thermal break (Plastic i believe) My focus has come to airtightness I am going to visit a supplier in the near future to discuss and see what they can offer. We had triple glazing installed this year which has made a big difference although i need to spend some time doing the details work with some airtight tape as currently we have lots of exp foam exposed. Our house is roughly 160sqm not including the loft so of a similar size to yours. I investigated a ASHP pump a number of times but have fallen on the idea of keeping the central heating system in place and opening up some existing fireplaces and having some log burners installed. I have my boiler currently set to 50C and over 2-3 hours it warms up enough. I worked out If i set it to 45C and run it for 10 hours a day at the current gas price it would be around £5 a day. I am hopeful i can achieve this once the property is insulated. We have suspended timber floor aside from the main hallway that run front to back about 8 meters long. I will most likely just remove the tiles and resurface it before putting down a hefty underlay. My logic for using woodfibre under the floorboards is simply to use the same products around the property. We had nothing and currently have around 200-300 in some places but i did this on my own and it was hard to fit through to the eaves area so i will definitely be redoing this area again with more care. This is one consideration i have put as quite a high priority. when renovating the downstairs rooms i will be pulling down the ceiling and packing out the floor voids. I look after my young daughter also and time is severely limited in which i can get things done. She will be attending nursery in august next year so that is when the project will kick in to full go. I have recently been debating about a wood burning rayburn, They can run up to 10 radiators and my logic is to install it into a UFH system. I am hoping that in the future we will be able to get some solar and feed a HW tank from that. I looked at a mini split system myself but we have tilt and turn so even in the summer we can get good ventilation. Just wanted to say thank you for your full and comprehensive response it has given me some good insight and inspiration i am going in the right direction. Did you undertake the work all yourself and what is your background work wise. How did you find the lime plastering and what thickness did you end up with? Regards Leigh

Hi George, I myself have been round in circles for quite sometime and have posted previously about the best way forward with our house. I have come to the point where i am going down the route of Solid Wall Masonry Lime Plaster Wood Fibre 60mm most likely Mesh Lime Plaster How long ago have you completed some of your works and how have you found the improvements. I never intended to tear out the whole house so want to hear some experiences of doing it. Also did you insulate your ground floor. I have mocked up this so far Wood fibre boards down the wall butted with wood fibre between the joists followed by an airtight membrane which proceeds up the wall before being lime plastered over. Regards

Hope someone can give me some advice. We had some triple glazed windows installed and are relatively happy with them. They have solved most of our noise problems. However I wanted to know if additional seals can be installed. They are tilt and turns with an outer and inner seal currently. I can see what looks like a channel near the outer edge which could accept a gasket of sorts.

It's an open discussion and we have similar problems with differing variables. If I'm being honest I think your bare structure will be somewhat simpler in terms of being able to stage out and implement ground up solutions from the get go. As a previous posted recommended the first thing that occurred to me would be to check your guttering and skews and coping stones I would also install some drip edges from your roof to your gutters to start. After another look at some information and the constraints I have most notably my front sandstone wall is south facing and most porous but managed by the sun however the rear is solid brick and receives no sun at all. So my solution as it stands is this. I will be stripping the paint off the rear of the property and have it repointed although it will not be a permanent solution I will be using a storm dry product to reduce the amount of water ingress into the wall via its face. Then after seeing about vented facades I will adopt a similar approach utilising my ground level airbrick and ventilated suspended floors to also ventilate a cavity wall that will run from the ground floor to the roof and maybe vent straight out. This will hopefully allow moisture to move upwards and outwards. As I mentioned before I may even look into a mvhr system and use some duct into the cavity also to aid circulation. Given all the money in the world I would most likely rip out everything and start again or knock it down ha but this seems to be the best compromise to my situation. The ventilation of the cavity Is work in progress but we will see what I end up doing and I will post up here with my build and outcomes. I really appreciate the wealth of knowledge and input from everyone and although there are differing views on solutions I have managed to pick through and take some really good ideas.

Having read through many articles and alot of advice from everywhere it appears you either go fully breathable or lime which has limiting factors on u values or you run the risk of condensation. I have someone coming over tomorrow to quote for the work and will see what there opinion is. But on the back of Simon's comments about ventilation in the cavity my only logical approach would be an airbrick in each of the walls but conservation area may cause problems or could a nuaire air mover be installed in the cavity created between the wall and insulation of about 30mm and vent into the loft space. If this would work it would not be that difficult to pipe down through the floorboards to the ground floor also. I guess it would just be the case of whether you could modulate the fan so that it was extremely low and I have a feeling they can be activated when humidity hits a certain level. This to me seems to solve all the problems???

ha lots of words is all I have. On a seperate note I have come across a study which has been quite informative. check out ribuild.eu if you go to the case studies it details maybe around 30 buildings of various construction types and varying types of insulation used they go on to take many different measurements in joists wall cavity temps etc etc. Just spent the day reading the report has helped me quite abit. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e8c2889b5462512e400d1e2/t/5e9db87943530a16d2f414eb/1587394701972/RIBuild_D3.2_v1.0.pdf

Thanks Simon I am now reading through this doument link. I am also thinking of knocking up a rig something like a reasonable sized wooden frame which i can mount to an outside wall on the inside layer some osb or plasterboard off cuts with insulation and then a VCL layer and then seal it to the wall and possibly grab a govee hygrometer and place it inside. It won't be a true representation but i may give an indication of things alongside when i remove it after a week or two i can inspect it for moisture.

I need to get a proper measurement on it but i think it is around 350-400mm and it has got bricks on the rear. Warm batten was my preferred method for quite a while but then i started to look at how the house is setup now which is gypliner 20mm off the wall with 15mm plasterboard over it. If i go warm batten i am changing the setup completely where as building a new stud 20-30mm off the wall and then putting in more insulation followed by double plasterboard is similar to what i have now only more robust. I am not an expert and your post i have read through there seems to be some highly knowledgeable people who will know far more than I, Your problem sounds a little more complex so may require an even more measured approach. Do you have some pictures of the building and the walls with the problems also?

Yeah we have 9 rooms to retrofit, the smallest room apart from the bathroom is probably 4mx4m. The reason for not going natural is for a few reasons 1. Finding people who will do it contacted a few explained never heard back. 2. Cost which would be substantial 3. Noise levels the house is like a bomb shelter but we do have heavy goods vehicles coming past at times and would like it as quiet as possible. 4. Lastly I am starting to think about future proofing the house for solar and ashp with energy rates being what they are. £2,500 energy bill for the last year lol will probably be £5,000 this time next year ha. So in essence it's about coming up with a common sense solution that can be executed over the whole house in a relatively timely manner. .

I had it in my head to have all the insulation in the studs leaving it easier to mount the plaster board to be fair. Thought about the warm batten method but something in my head keeps telling me to separate the wall from the inside. I have to admit I'm not overly worried about the sandstone wall on the front as it is South facing and gets quite a bit of sun daily. Has anyone run two types of insulation together?

I don't think a lime finish will help anything to be fair. That is an external wall which was covered in some paint which I have started to remove. Plan is remove it back to bare brick and see how it goes. Guttering is ok but was put up quickly when we moved in. Eventually the roof will get completely redone. That's if I don't knock it down before like Bob suggests ha. But all jokes aside I am happy with the building as it stands I have belief it will perform fine once we start upping the insulation inside but you never know.