How to Insulate a Victorian terrace.
We have just started a small project for a customers in Wakefield.
The house we are working on is a 1900 terraced house , these types of houses don’t have insulation in between the cavity and have what’s is called a 9 inch solid wall. They didn’t insulate the houses , what they did instead was send a brick through the wall from the outside to the inside course and in doing so tied both skins together. The problem with doing that is that there is no room for a cavity but it does make for an extremely solid build house. What we have been called in to do with this property is to make it more thermal efficient which involves insulating the internal walls and ceilings. What we use for this is an insulated plasterboard. This is made up of 50 mm of thermal hardboard with 12.5 mm of plasterboard adhered to the back, we use this board on the walls and on the ceiling. 50 mm of hardboard insulation has the same properties as 100 mm rock wool, for those of you that don’t know what Rockwool is, it’s that stuff that looks like Brown candy floss it’s super itchy awful stuff! To fix these boards we first fix wooden latt to the wall at 400 centres, then screw and plug to fix them in place to hold them tight. Then cut the insulated board to size and screw them to the latts. As for the ceilings we make a small hole to find where the original ceiling joists are, then measure and mark on the ceiling as to where we can fix, then it’s measure cut and fix the boards to the joists.
Doing smaller projects such as this is a welcome break from the larger ones we usually take on, and in winter it’s great to have some indoor work!
