Insulating between floorboards in 1930's house ?

[Jonno2001]

Hi All

I live in a 1933, standard 3 bedroom house. However being an old house I don't have cavity walls. Even with all the other energy improvements I've made over the last few years, double glazing, better internal doors, new radiators and boiler system etc, the house still has a general cold feel to it, especially into the evening when the heating has been turned off.

Whilst replacing sections of the upstairs central heating pipework runs, I was wondering if there was any advantage ... or even disadvantages to filling the ceiling/upper floorboard cavity with standard loft insulation material ??

Any suggestions, pro's or con's please let me know.

Regards
John

 

[tony1851]

No advanatge in doing that. Much better to put additional insulation in the roof space.

 

[Lower]

Insulating between the floor boards will help keep the heat in the downstairs rooms, but the flip side is it won't be quite as warm in the upstairs rooms.

Depends which rooms you want to be warm.

 

[AronSearle]

It depends on what else you have done.

If you have an uninsulated suspended ground floor, and uninsulated walls, it will make little difference as you have so much heat loss.

If you have insulated the suspended ground floor, it will make some difference to the ground floor, as you then only have the walls to lose heat.

You should focus on insulating the ground floor, you can also include a membrane which you can lap behind skirtings to reduce drafts.

Then some insulated plasterboard if you can tolerate losing 60mm or so on your walls.

 

[kbdiy]

Far better to concentrate on insulating the entire envelope rather than stopping heat rising to the 1st floor, assuming you do require some level of comfort up there as well. I heat my ground floor to a reasonable comfort level and just allow residual heat to rise up and heat the bedrooms, so I rarely need the rads upstairs on.

Much depends on your personal comfort levels but better to aim for about 300mm in the loft to retain heat in the house and the other external elements as well.

 

[Jonno2001]

Wow, thank you for all of the replies and all of you pretty much saying the same thing ... not really worth the effort.

Unfortunately I can't do much about the suspended ground floor either because of the laminated flooring already over the top of the original flooring (fortunately there is a layer of insulation between the 2 boards).

I have seen a friends house with the Insulated walls, and that was a nightmare for him, fairly expensive and very time consuming when door frames get in the way etc, but thank you all the same.

Finally, I have not long replaced the Insulation on the loft, but I've also decked it all out to make use of the open space, so while the insulation was rated to 300mm, its compressed down to about 200mm.

I spent a fair bit of last year sealing small drafts around downstairs skirting and even more so around the UPVC window frames.

So I guess for an old house, i've probably done about all I can do.
The balance between big rooms, high ceilings etc, offset by the higher energy running costs.


Thank you all once again though
John