Home insulation means saving energy, on every level, from the personal to the global. As people become increasingly conscious of the importance of environmental issues, one of the greatest contributions everyone can make is to cut down on unnecessary waste of fossil fuels, and to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning them. This means making more efficient use of energy, and home insulation has a big part to play in this. It will save you money too.

House insulation is a means of stopping heat transfer from a warm area to a cold one. For most of this country, the outside air temperature is below what most people regard as a comfortable figure for much of the year, so we need to heat our homes up at some point during the year to compensate for this.

Home Insulation

The problem is that all the home insulation products and materials we traditionally use in house-building conduct heat to a greater or lesser extent. Wood is a fairly good insulator, brick an average one and glass is downright poor, as anyone who has sat next to a window on a cold winter’s day will testify.

Worst of all, providing well-insulated homes has until comparatively recently been a very low priority, both for house-builders and for the legislators who frame the Building Regulations with which builders must comply.

However, at last the tide is turning, and the latest amendments to the Building Regulations require much higher standards of home insulation than ever before for new buildings. They have also belatedly recognized the problems that over-insulation can cause as far as condensation is concerned, both inside the house itself and also within the building’s structure. This means that new houses may cost a little more, but will consume up to 20 per cent less heat.

House Insulation

Unfortunately, this will not help those people living in older properties, many of which were originally built with no thought to their insulation performance at all. Of course, over the years various attempts will have been made to improve the task of home insulation for houses like these (by introducing services like cavity wall insulation and even grants for loft insulation), but what was deemed adequate ten or twenty years ago is well below par nowadays. Therefore it will certainly pay for you to check out your existing house insulation, with a view to improving it for the future.

Cost-Effectiveness

Before thinking about individual types of home insulation, it is important to understand the concept of cost-effectiveness. All home insulation products cost money to install and can benefit you in either of two ways. It can enable you to reduce your heating bills, since your home will waste less heat and you can maintain the same internal temperatures without burning so much fuel. The annual saving that you make as a result will ‘pay back’ the cost of the extra insulation.

If you are also considering replacing your heating system, having better standards of home insulation may also mean you can specify a less powerful (and less expensive) boiler and smaller (or fewer) radiators, which will be an indirect one-off saving, but valuable nonetheless. Installing simple foam pipe installation and fiberglass insulation in the walls and loft will also help restrict heat loss.

Alternatively, you can enjoy higher internal temperatures than before without increasing your heating bills, but in this case there will be no direct savings, just a better degree of comfort.

As a guide to cost-effectiveness, hot-tank and attic  insulation and draught proofing score the highest, while double glazing and professionally installed roof insulation are the least cost-effective. Other home insulation measures fall somewhere between the two.