Cost of Living Crisis

With energy costs soaring, keeping warm in the UK’s leaky homes has for many doubled over the last year or so. The UK has some of the oldest (and leakiest) homes in Europe. So, if your home is cold, what can you do? If you have some resources to thermally improve your home, where do you start?

Here at New Build Air Testing, we are big fans of The Fully Charged Show and this video https://youtu.be/boXcakRvx_Q hosted by the actor Robert (Red Dwarf) Llewellyn describes the benefits of completing an air pressure test on an existing home.

Being a trained retrofit coordinator and my colleague Vince being an ATTMA Passivhaus air tester and NICEC approved MVHR commissioner, we have lots of experience that we can bring to bear on your home, to improve its energy performance whilst considering indoor air quality. We have worked on single homes and with large social housing providers.

By using a thermal imaging camera at the same time as depressurising the building, we can often identify air leakage paths from outside to inside, lurking behind the plasterboard or from under the kitchen sink.

Common issues are box-outs hiding soil pipes, holes up through the ground floor, leaky loft hatches, leaky doors and windows, cupboards in loft rooms and rooms over garages. We can identify these during the test and we highlight products and techniques that most DIY enthusiasts can tackle themselves with a bit time and effort.

Although not part of the air pressure test, we can help explain thermal bridges and why you might have a mould problem in certain locations around the home and potential improvements that can be made to reduce this.

We can issue a short report on what to do where and the potential savings that you might gain. Remember, generally it is finding lots of little problems and little savings, then adding them together to make quite big differences to your thermal comfort and running costs.