need help with a loft room insulation query guys

[mikeg68]

I live in a house with two bedrooms in the loft space. It was built like this from new. Two separate rooms with a central staircase leading up to them, both with a door to each. Now the problem i have is, now that we have snow, my house is the only house in the street with no snow on the roof! I'm guessing that there may not be insulation between the plaster board and roof itself. Is this possible/legal? If there is no insulation, what would be the best option because I must be losing some amount of heat through the roof.

Cheers

 

[big-all]

how old is the house??

 

[mointainwalker]

"If there is no insulation, what would be the best option because I must be losing some amount of heat through the roof.

If there is no insulation, the best idea is to put some in. What else do you need to know ?

 

[alittlerespect]

Hi

If you had no insulation you would find the heat loss intolerable, you would find the rooms freezing cold in winter and be having problems with condensation and it would be costing you a fortune to heat the rooms.

It is likely that a fibreglass material was used which met the building regulation standards at the time, but having snow on the roof indicates that there is still a measurable amount of heat loss occuring. The issue really becomes one of whether or not you are experiencing any of the previously mentioned conditions e.g. high energy bills?


If you really want to go exploring the situation I would suggest that you cut a small hole out of the plasterboard to determine what if any insulation was installed. If you don't find any insulation material use a pad saw to cut a larger hole say around 100mm x 100mm and retain the piece removed for re-fixing. If you get a small mirror, hold this in the void at an angle and use a lamp or torch to reflect light into the void, this should illuminate sufficient space to view what type and thickness of insulation material was used.

On the basis that you do find insulation material, your next decision would be whether or not you would wish to increase the insulation to your rooms, if so there would be no need to go completely over the top and what you should consider is adding a PIR insulated plasterboard such as Kingspan k18 which could simply be stuck over the face of the existing external facing surfaces.
This material comes in various thickness, and I have a general rule of thumb that for every 25mm thickness of insulation material the heat loss is halved. As mentioned before, if you had no insulation the conditions in the rooms would be intolerable, therefore you may find 25mm thickness of PIR insulation material more than adequate (depends on what you find when you do your inspection) but at worst you should need no more than say a 50mm of PIR insulation material - not forgetting the thickness of the plasterboard which would add 12.5mm to the overall thickness of the insulating boards.

Regards

 

[lostinfens]

This being a dormer style house , could it be that the snow just fell off?
Is your roof pitch a bit on the steep side?--Just a thought