Our house is a hotchpotch

[frogs4all]

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to meet you all!

 

I've done a lot of reading here and elsewhere on energy efficiency, retrofit, solar PV, MVHR, ASHP and battery storage. And I've concluded what I need to worry about right now is insulation and airtightness. So this is what I want to address as we renovate.

 

When it's windy, the door to the attic blows open, and we can feel the wind through the living room windows. Parts of the house are uninsulated and what insulation there is is not very thick or consistent. Almost all windows are timber double-glazed but most have airtightness issues or the glazing units have blown or are very thin.

 

The house is in Gloucestershire and is a complicated mix of small stone end-of-terrace cottage, doubled in size around 1905 when the whole terrace had a brick frontage added, 2 storey extension to the side in 1993, then conservatory added at the back, which was rebuilt in masonry around 2005 and partly knocked through into the 1993 kitchen to leave a strange ground floor plan. We bought about 4 years ago, knocked through completely and rationalised the ground floor plan to create a much larger kitchen. We also renovated the bathroom and living room. The rest of the house needs work. We live in the house and probably have enough space now to shuffle around as we renovate room-by-room but that doesn't lend itself to getting builders in as well as it does to DIY.

 

I dream of building our own house one day, but I don't know if I will live long enough to persuade my wife 😉

 

I'm looking forward to drawing on your collective wisdom!

Duncan

[Mr Punter]

Hi Duncan and welcome.

 

Insulation and airtightness is a good start for energy efficiency improvements.  It is surprising the difference some decent draft proofing can make, even though it will not feed through to your EPC.

 

Are you going to do an overall plan of works for the whole house or just do bits piecemeal when you have the time / funds?

[Redbeard]

Hi and welcome from another relative newbie.

 

As intimated by @Mr Punter I would strongly suggest that you do a Whole House Plan (detailing your wishes, target U values, where the air-tightness layer will be, what it will be, *how* it will be) at the outset, even if you have to do a room at a time. I am 35 years into my 'incremental retrofit'!

 

Doing the Whole House Plan allows you to identify the 'edges' - those perimeter bits which the next stage of work will need to connect to when you get round to it in however many years. There are some who believe that 'move out and rip out' is the only answer. If that were the case then 99% of my clients over the last 20 years would have done nothing. You do have to be careful not to leave gaps and potential 'moist edges', but with care (and documentation) it can be done. In particular note that the tighter you make it the less you can rely on 'unintentional ventilation', so design in your ventilation 'system' (even if it's not MVHR) sooner rather than later.

 

Enjoy it; it's fun!

[frogs4all]

Hi @Redbeard and @Mr Punter

 

19 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

Are you going to do an overall plan of works for the whole house or just do bits piecemeal when you have the time / funds?

 

Most things I want to tackle incrementally as time, funds and especially opportunity allows. There are some larger jobs that need doing, e.g. replace thin and mostly blown DGUs, strip back attic room walls, remove slumped fibreglass insulation, re-insulate, re-board and re-plaster. But there are also lots of smaller easier wins, e.g. fill holes left in building envelope when services were removed in the past, replace very leaky stable door to kitchen, etc, top up loft insulation (the loft is in the 1993 part and the attic room is in the 1905 part).

 

But I'm starting to think I should draw up a floorplan as-is and annotate the changes required, problem areas and existing services.

 

19 hours ago, Redbeard said:

In particular note that the tighter you make it the less you can rely on 'unintentional ventilation', so design in your ventilation 'system' (even if it's not MVHR) sooner rather than later.

 

Good advice, thank you. I'm pretty sold on MVHR after getting a single-room Envirovent unit for the bathroom. It's not perfect (and neither was the installation) but I can see how MVHR could work for the whole house. I'm not planning to install MVHR yet. It doesn't seem worth it while the house is so leaky. But I have a plan that covers most of the house with 2 problem rooms left to solve.

 

19 hours ago, Redbeard said:

I am 35 years into my 'incremental retrofit'!

 

Well done for keeping going!