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Loft Conversion is cold


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Hi All

 

We had our loft conversion completed a few years ago and each Autumn/Winter the room gets very cold, especially in comparison to other rooms in the house. I suppose the first question is - is that normal?

 

More specifically, the set up of the room means that on both sides we have cupboards leading into the eves. The eves are quite breezy and I’m wondering if this is normal or if it should be more enclosed? The eves have insulation but aren’t boarded over, should they be?

 

Lastly, the cupboard doors are “just” MDF, that I’ve now put a draft excluder on but they still let in a draft, are there better doors that are made more specially for something like this?

 

Thank you in advance for any help.

 

Rikki

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53 minutes ago, Rikki Holland said:

The eves have insulation

Where is this insulation?, if it were me I would insulate all round a cupboard lining, so the cupboard is insulated and will stay draught free and the same temp as the loft room.

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Perhaps it would be worth having the cupboards boarded with insulated plasterboard and taped 

We are doing four houses at the moment with a similar setup 

One of the cupboards houses the solar power gear and will not be accessed by the owner 

But is still required to be insulated and skimmed 

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Chances are that it is very draughty under the floor with outdoor air blowing through your underfloor second floo floor void ?

 

then some of the insulation could be thermally bypassed, missing or poorly installed. Do you have any pics from when it was being built

 

how about a thermal imaging survey to highlight  problem areas. 

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12 minutes ago, tonyshouse said:

how about a thermal imaging survey to highlight  problem areas. 

 

If you can get your hands on a FLIR camera and attach it to your phone it is great for checking if insulation is missing in between the rafters and where cold air is getting into a room. I went all over our house using it to highlight cold air leaks.

 

Depending on the roof build up, it may be ventilated at the eaves so they cannot be closed off. If you can get into the eaves behind the plasterboard and seal and insulate the plasterboard then that would probably help. Thinking of the doors as like an outside door and properly draught excluding them, as you have already tried, will also help. Certainly this is an easy starting point to see if the draught is the issue or there are other issues. But if you cannot seal off the eaves space from cold air then the eaves insulation is pointless and you need to insulate the room walls instead.

 

We have spaces like this in our house, but they are sealed and insulated. However we too have MDF doors into these spaces which I have been trying to seal and insulate. I have been looking at air tight loft hatches, but I am not sure that they will look right. I put external door draught seals on them yesterday to see if that makes a difference.

Edited by AliG
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The first obvious thing to try is foaming or taping between the rafters and insulation and also the joints between the boards. Other wise cold air all be blowing in those small gaps between the boards and the rafters. Looking at it they fit pretty tightly so you probably just need to tape them.

 

Do you think cold air is coming in elsewhere, like at the bottom or tope edges of the insulation or through the floorboards?

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+1

Its quite likely there is a ventilated gap on the cold side of the insulation so if the insulation isn't tight fitting cold air gets through the gaps to the "warm" side. There are many ways a good design can be ruined by poor construction.

 

You could also put another layer of insulation fixed to the rafters in addition to taping joints. However this only deals with the problem in the cupboards. Its likely you have same issue behind the plasterboard 

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Replace the doors with one piece of 25mm ply/MDF. Glue some 100mm pir insulation onto the back. 

Attach a frame of 2*2 around the edge of the opening. Drill 4 holes in the corners for screws. Use some foam draught tape around the inside edge of the 2*2. You will need screw cups and 70mm screws. Insert these in the 2*2 and then screw from the outside so it pulls the ply/MDF board tight against the draught tape so it forms an airtight seal. 

You will need a handle on the ply/ MDF to allow you to position it and pull it in close enough to attach the screws.

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There is a fundamental design flaw here.

 

They have tried (whether successful or not is another matter) to run the insulation following the profile of the room, but then made cupboard door openings into the cold and ventilated eaves space. And of course the door is not insulated and lets in cold draughts.

 

The proper way to do this would have been to run the insulation following the roof line all the way up both sides so that when it is sealed and taped, the eaves cupboards would be inside the warm envelope and there would be no draughts and no heat loss to worry about.

 

You would expect this if it had been done a long time ago. But just 2 years?  Just WHEN are builders going to start learning something about properly insulating and draught proofing buildings?

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Fakro do a smart sealed and insulated door for this kind of application,. We've a couple of similar spaces in ours ( however they're "inside"in terms of insulation and airtightness) and we put a pair of these doors in. They're pretty good quality and not at all expensive

 

https://www.fakro.co.uk/products/all-products/loft-ladders/dwk/

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