Home insulation is the latest net zero farce- Ross Clark
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
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Zoe Godrich of Swansea might best be described as collateral damage in Britain’s glorious march towards net zero. Three years ago, she had her three-bedroom home fitted with cavity-wall insulation – which the government is out to encourage through its Great British Insulation Scheme. Sadly for her, it has not worked out quite as intended.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong?
Within weeks of having it fitted, Godrich says her walls started to run with water, and black mould started to form on her walls. She can no longer use two of her bedrooms, and she and her children now have to slum it on mattresses in the one remaining habitable room. The company which installed the insulation also went bust and the guarantee for the work turned out to be useless. Her only option seemed to be having the insulation sucked out of the wall – for which she had to borrow £7,000 to have done. That work turned out to be botched, too.
Godrich’s experience, it turns out, seems to be becoming commonplace. Twenty miles away in Rhondda Cynon Taff, 280 homes had to have cavity-wall insulation removed after it made their walls damp. The BBC is reporting that Ofgem has told it that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of homes which have been fitted with cavity-wall insulation have been left with problems due to it being badly fitted. There are an estimated 15 million homes in Britain which have such insulation fitted – many of them courtesy of subsidy schemes launched by the present government and the last Labour government.
But if there is a lesson here, it is one that our leaders seem determined not to learn. While the present government has launched its Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 households in a three-year period from last March at a cost of £1 billion, Labour is promising to go much further. Under its Warm Homes Plan, every home in Britain would be brought up to the standard of a ‘C’ on an Energy Performance Certificate over the next decade – using loft insulation, cavity-wall insulation and solid-wall insulation. A Treasury analysis suggests that it would cost taxpayers between £12 billion and £15 billion a year for the next 10 years. According to Labour, it will save households £500 a year on bills – unless, presumably, they have the same experience as Zoe Godrich and many others, in which case they may find themselves having to take out emergency loans to put right botched work.
It is possible to retrofit old houses properly to bring them closer to the energy performance standards of new homes, but it is also possible to damage them through such work. This is as true of solid-wall insulation as it is of cavity-wall insulation. Linda Griffiths of Carmarthenshire found that out the hard way, when she spend £30,000 fitting it to her home, partly with the aid of a £10,000 grant from another government scheme, the Energy Company Obligation. She, too, ended up with damp – and was left complaining that her home had been devalued by £100,000.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong? As with so much to do with net zero, reason seems to go out of the window as governments seek to meet their rashly-set targets.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/home-insulation-is-the-latest-net-zero-farce/
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Just think – if we continue to let the world warm gently, there’d be less need to insulate.
Ironic comment of the week, nice one Charlie! 😂
Irony? Where? ‘Tis a fact.
Absolutely spot-on Charlie.
Well said Charlie – spot on!
I agree wholeheartedly Charlie. I still love the irony though. The benefits of a warmer climate are never mentioned whereas a colder world will cause greater harm.
My son had to have it removed from his house last year due to damp.
Whereas our house has had it since the 1990s without a problem.
Reading about it afterwards it appears we were lucky, because the Cavity is there for a very good reason.
“Retro-fitting” anything in existing homes is always expensive and carries significant risk of incompetent design, management and workmanship. (Heat Pumps being an outstanding example).
But what about the millions of existing homes with solid walls, leaky roofs, bunged up rainwater drains?
Demolishing and rebuilding the lot, (leaving only a few listed buildings) would be the most practical option. Apart from the cost, of course.
No wonder they have the plebs in their gunsights.
The cowboy builders, fitters and developers quickly moved in once the government started giving away taxpayers’ money to save the planet.
Yes, and can you imagine the number of cowboys who will be installing heatpumps! And try and get them serviced or repaired after a few years – no chance. The house I bought ten years ago had a solar heated water sytem installed a few years previously. It is fine – when it is working, but I had a simple leak and needed the antifreeze changing. I spent a couple of months trying to find someone – anyone – to fix it. The very few firms still involved were well out of my area and not interested. In the end I found someone nearby who used to install them, but now only does PV systems. He agreed to do it as he still had the equipment. I was lucky – although it was expensive.
Too right – they’ll cluster like moths to a candle.
I came across this recently – https://retrofitskills.org
This site talks of spending £17,000 million on retrofitting – just in South London. No, not even all of London.
To do the UK will cost – I guess – 10 to 20 times that – so – whoo! – 170 to 340 BILLION. Even 10% of that, over 10 years, is still a very tolerable income each year.
And where will that money come from?
Probably not the homeowners … so Muggins the Taxpayer looks likely.
And this is only Part of the cost of Nut Zero. We haven’t built the birdchoppers [aka bat-busters], or imported the slaver panels from the nice cuddly Mr Xi! Let alone dug up the copper to connect them all – or paid off the ‘science is settled’ mob yet.
Which we know is absolutely not needed – CO2 is plant food not pollution.
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The basic concept of older solid wall construction was that the internal warmth drove out the moisture in the wall. Insulate the wall on the outside and any moisture moves inwards. Insulate the inside and the outer section remains cold and damp, parts start to decay and fungal moulds grow.
A friend had their Grade 2 listed building internally dry lined and insulated a few years ago. The first problem noted was the hyphae spreading up the walls. The second problem was the £28,000 to rip off all the lining, treat the rot it had caused and redecorate without it.
Yes Ray, That’s kinda what we say too. Drafty old farmhouses need a bit of heating in the winter but otherwise we are a robust healthy bunch! Certainly we’ve closed off all open fireplaces in replacing with STOVES ( But now we are not supposed to burn WOOD ( pellets ) in them either. Aye , Pellets & Chips – how much OIL to make & transport them? Logs would have been better left entire but more difficult to regulate for a wee fire for a wee whilie in the evening, unlike pellets – burning just a Han’full.
My cousin in Perthshire has a good old stalwart Rayburn Supreme that does central heating (on a gravity circuit with no pump) hot water and they mostly cook by it (though they do have an LPG cooker as well). He lights it up in about September and it stays on continuously till about now. I was surprised to find it even had a “clinker” removal facility that allowed you to get rid of the stuff without the fire going out.
It does cost a bit more than gas in burning coal but it is completely independent of electricity supply to operate which he says has possibly been a life saver in the past.
Ray Sanders mentions a cousin’s Rayburn Supreme. Many photos on the web show units that are not installed – no flu. Some are old and are being sold as used. My favorite is this one, for the color. {Amazingly clean}
RAYBURN_300W_CLARET_stove.JPG (1500×1000) (cheminees.com.au)
Exactly.
Spending £30,000 to save £500 per year doesn’t sound like a good investment to me.
The purported £500 saving is almost certainly a gross exaggeration in an attempt to encourage people to have the insulation done. Cavity wall insulation is notoriously problematic for many types of houses. My house has a timber frame with bricks on the outside and cavity wall insulation would destroy the house because the wood frame needs ventilation. I have heard of many horror stories of cavity wall insulation being pumped into houses which are not suitable for it.
Average UK domestic annual gas consumption is estimated at around 12,000kWh per house. Not all of that is space heating and just heating one tank of hot water daily racks up about 8kWh or over 3,000kWh annually.
Assuming 9,000 kWh for space heating alone at 5.48p per kWh from 1st July equates to £493 per annum. Can these government geniuses explain to me how this insulation is going to save £500?
No doubt it was worked out when gas prices were 10x higher and nobody has bothered to look at it. Miliband always quotes the 6x more expensive than renewables line, even though that only applied at the peak of the gas price spike. And of course all the experts said prices would stay high.
Good thing they weren’t doing their sums when the gas spot price went negative in October 2022.
I think this goes back a long time. I seem to remember in the 80s everyone talking about cavity wall insulation and getting leaflets and phone calls. It was that and double glazing. There were lots of stories then of people having problems with damp after the work was carried out. I asked one of the callers about damp and he said it’s not a problem, it’s all guaranteed by the British Board of Agremont.
Yes indeed, but what I forgot to add in an earlier comment, WHY do the housebuilders build wooden houses in WINTER – when it’s wet ? ( COLD = WET) roofing seals-in wet material will take ages to dry out with all that entails. ( But the MetOff tell us that global warming means More WET ? )
Summer has longer days to work in and tends to be drier …. Huh watch THat house Bldg Prog with unusual designs ….. so much rain in some places to appreciate the problem, then scale it up. Large Scale Bldg means it has to be done come rain or shine…. as for the Planet ? No Joke
I’m getting warnings about malware on this page.
C’mon, insulating homes needn’t cost the earth.
Just £60k/home:
“Retrofitting each house on Abbey Road, Huddersfield cost around £60,000, which means doing the same for the nation’s 1.6million council houses would cost £96billion”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11260727/Councils-green-plan-hailed-Keir-Starmer-Labour-conference-costs-60-000-home.html
Shouldn’t ‘cavity-wall insulation‘ mean creating a wall, within which is a cavity, not removing that cavity?
The real problem is not enough ventilation in her house. Each person exhales around a litre of water a day, then add boiling kettles, cooking, showers, drying washing on radiators etc. All that moisture is not escaping and is condensing on her walls.
There may well be ventilators in some of her rooms that have been partially blocked or she is not opening the windows enough during the day to allow the moisture to escape. Dry air heats quicker when the heating comes on so its not more expensive to have the ventilation.
It’s almost certainly not the fault of the insulation which means the inside of the walls stay warmer and less likely to condense water. Years ago when most people had been single glazing there would be condensation on the inside of the glass in the morning. With good quality double glazing the condensed water is now on the outside.
There might be a problem of the insulation wicking moisture from the outside to the inside.
If the wall is exposed to driving rain on the outside, this can be a problem apparently.
Also a lot of the insulation seems to be paper-based. It’s a bit worrying because you can imagine it getting completely sodden wet in winter if there even small leaks.
Rockwool does not wick water. Our house was done 30 years ago and no water has come across. 99% of internal water problems in houses is because of not enough ventilation as I said.
I had Rockwool – many years ago. No problem, certainly until I moved out about 12-15 years later.
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There are air-bricks usually at the bottom of the inner wall that ventilate the interior into the cavity, and air-bricks low down and under the eaves on the outer wall which causes an upward draft keeping the interior condensation free and the inner wall dry.
Filling the cavity with insulation stops this process.
There is some truth in what you say but your central point about the inner wall staying warmer increases the temperature differential with the outer wall and unless the cavity has ventilation (which it won’t have if retro injected) there will be a moisture build up in the cavity.
You are also wrong on the external condensation on windows. If the windows prevent internal heat warming up the outer pane there will be no temperature differential so no condensation. And despite the hype modern windows are not that good!
I beg to differ. The dampness was not there before the cavity wall insulation was installed, so ventilation of the house must have been adequate.
Blowing insulation into an existing cavity wall inevitably fills it and creates a pathway for water to pass from the outer wall to the inner one. If the outer wall gets soaked from driving rain (as it will do in Swansea and all other West coast places) then damp will inevitably get to the inner wall.
New builds are different because the insulation can be installed to leave a gap between inner and outer walls
This is the problem with imposition, it never works well, and flies in the face of engineering solutions from those who know about domestic heating. Fanatical devotion to Net Zero means ignoring reality, no matter the cost. I live in a new house, designed from the ground up for a heat pump ( I’m off the gas grid too). That said it is more expensive than a gas boiler and I’ve learned to live with it. Ironically there are plenty of Devon cob houses around that have survived well enough for 300 years and more. They don’t need social engineering from our stupid politicians.
The reality IS the cost. Net Zero’s goal is to eliminate middle-class wealth, the last barrier to world government. Insulation, heat pumps, EVs, windmills, solar panels, no oil . . . their purpose is to spend your money on frivolous junk, leaving you to government whim.
Wealth = freedom
In a world heated by renewables, it won’t save any money at all. The majority of the cost of renewables is the capital cost. That gets paid no matter how much output from them you use.
I had a mid-terraced BTL that had insulation imposed on it by the local authority. No wall cavities as solid bricks, so internal insulation at the front to keep up appearances and external render to the rear. In no time the inner rear walls were damp due to moisture having no way of escaping externally.
It caused months of chaos before being reluctantly resolved by the installation company. A complete waste of time and money.
My lounge carpet could do with replacing. I know, what about one with improved thermal insulation? That would help reduce my heating bill…..may I have a subsidy please? What do you mean I should pay for it myself – my taxes are paying for others home improvements and I am helping to “Save the Planet” so they should jolly well pay for mine!
We took “advantage” of the free loft insulation on offer one summer a few years ago – done by rough-and-ready sub-contractors who, in their ignorance, completely covered the frost protection heater in the loft. Come the first frost in late October, the heater came on, the insulation smouldered for some hours (“what’s that smell?” we mused for a few hours), until it eventually caught light and destroyed one room.
Retro-fitting insulation needs competent specialist advice. Done wrongly, it can change the temperature gradient within the wall so that dew point is located within the fabric. If that happens, the house will become damp. Proper installation of a vapour check membrance may avoid/correct the dampness.
Jevons paradox means that savings are minimal anyway since people just enjoy a warmer house. Recent Cambridge research found about 4% initial fuel reduction with loft insulation reducing to zero over a couple of years as people wore fewer sweaters.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/insulation-only-provides-short-term-reduction-in-household-gas-consumption-study-of-uk-housing
The problem with these schemes is that although laudable they only encourage “cowboys” to set up as installers, whose primary aim is to Get Rich Quick. 99.9999% of insurance backed guarantees are worthless as they only exist as long as the installing company exists, so very quickly you find that Bodgit and Scarper who installed your insulation with a 20-25yr guarantee have gone out of business, setting up again as Bodgit and Scarper (2024) to repeat the same action. Insulation properly installed is a viable option for most homes, but it has too be done correctly and be checked for both quality of installation but also suitability. Currently the UK is being bombarded by solar energy companies promising 25-90% savings on electricity if you just install “our system”, offering a life time guarantee- which means in most if not all cases, the lifetime of the “May fly” company, and don’t expect any help as and when the problems start- you have no redress with the added bonus of a bloody big bill. Don’t even think that a company registered with the various reputable trade bodies is a guarantee of compliance and quality- the registration fee is a pittance and the checks are haphazard. The only protection the public has is self reliance and only using tradespeople who are known to Friends and Family, where work already carried out can be inspected, valid unbiased feedback given, comments on workmanship, performance etc.- always remember, just because your paranoid about being taken for a “ride” doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to rip you off.
On our damp little island.
I wonder why Victorian architects designed houses with cavity walls? Could it have been to separate the inner wall from the outer wall to avoid damp penetration, and by use of air-bricks in each wall to ensure flow of air through the cavity to prevent moisture build-up in the cavity and keep the inner wall dry, and stop condensation inside the house? Perhaps they also knew air is a great insulator and would help prevent heat loss, and a warmer inner wall would help keep it dry.
A Chesterton’s Fence case study: don’t replace what’s there until you are sure you know why it’s there.
I am old enough to remember the Government inspired insulation craze of the oil-crises riven 1970s and the end of oil calamity scheduled for 1990, then rescheduled for 2000.
Then it was grants for loft insulation to prevent heat-loss through the roof space. It was very successful. So successful that houses with cold water header tanks for the hot water system and associated pipework in those lofts – commonplace in those days before combi-boilers – suffered frozen, burst pipes in Winter and flooded homesThen John Prescott’s regulations for condenser gas-boilers, which had an external run-off pipe which froze in Winter and the boilers shut down.
Government’s motto: another day another unforeseen consequence.
Father forgive them for they know not what they do.
Two notes:
In earlier times, ice was cut from pond surfaces and saved in double walled buildings – the interior cavity was filled with sawdust. This was a type of cavity wall construction. There was one mostly intact [the 1970s] where I lived in northern Idaho.
Note 2: how walls are built where I now live {2020s]:
First photo shows inside installation of 5.5 inch insulation and 2×6** studs.
[2 in. by 6 in, becomes 1.5 x 5.5 when planed smooth]
Note the backing wood, panels of Oriented Strand Board (OSB),
internalwallinsuation2.jpg (1400×755) (warmfrontteam.co.uk)
The photo here shows installing a water-barrier (Tyvek) on the outside of a new building. Afterward, a cover of stone, wood, or composite panels will finish the outside.
DuPont-Tyvek-HomeWrap-2783×1856 (2783×1856) (scene7.com)
My, oh, my! Gamecock’s fingerprints are all over that Tyvek™ 1057B. He worked on the shop floor in Richmond for 6 years in the 1970s, then in computer support til 1980.
To John and GC, it’s small world really. Spent the last 2 months building an extension on my son’s house. 6″ x 2″ tanalised timber frame, 1/2 inch OSB wall sheathing and covered with …..Tyvek™ then battened and overclad in featheredge. Did use a more civilised insulation Cellotex – problem is though when you saw it up it stinks of fish for some reason.
“It is possible to retrofit old houses properly to bring them closer to the energy performance standards of new homes”
Actually, for existing houses subject to driving rain (Typically on the West coast of Britain) I doubt that it is possible. Blowing any sort of insulation into existing cavity walls inevitably fills up the cavity and provides a pathway for water to travel from the water-soaked outer wall to the inner one. Cavity walls were invented to maintain this gap precisely to stop water penetration to the inner wall.
It’s different with new builds – the insulation (typically expanded polystyrene sheets) can be suspended onto the inner or outer walls, so as to still leave a gap between the two walls.
Insulation contractors will say anything to householders to get them to sign up to having cavity wall insulation, so they can collect the Govt grants. The “guarantees” they offer are pretty much always worthless.
But I fear the likely forthcoming Labour govt will force cavity wall insulation onto reluctant householders, probably initially be denying mortgages to houses without it.
Pardon me for noticing but according to the Arts graduate climate experts, I thought we are all going to die from global boiling or whatever asinine term the useful idiots concocted last week.
My point is, the statements telling us we are all going to fry and at the same time as telling us we have to insulate our homes against cold make rather strange bed fellows. If we are going to fry then we do not need insulation, or am I missing something in their make it up as they go along fear campaign to occupy and dominate every aspect of our lives?