Help please!
I am living in a 19th century cottage. The roofs are all slanting and interconnecting with next door. The roof is understandably old and we have no insulation. The insulation guy said that he could not lay more than 3m square because of the slanting roofs and him not being able to get access beyond a few feet. What can we do the bills are astronomical!
Thanks
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I had a similar problem although the house is not as old but it does have a number of sloping roof areas typical of chalet house construction. The central section of the house is two storey with conventional loft area in which the under tile sarking paper had rotted over fifty years and exposed lots of tiles so that in winter it allowed wind to sweep through carrying dust, dirt, grit from the ageing tiles and occasionally snow. I obtained some rolls of paper/bitumen/paper (my description) which I stapled to the underside of the rafters, starting at the top to allow ingress of water dust etc to run down to the outer edge. The paper stops just short of the loft floor to allow air ventilation of the upper side of the "paper".
The main advantage of this is the reduction of draughts and dirt entering the loft space and a definite reduction of heat loss The difficult part was (and still is) the sloping roof areas where access is very difficult. Some of these are accessible by crawling and here I have placed fibreglass loft insulation blanket cut to the width between rafters and placed direct under the tiles (or any existing roofing felt) then supported with "breathable membrane" or aluminium faced thermal foil, stapled to the underside of the rafters. I have yet to learn how effective this will be against winter cold or summer heat.
As with you, the man from the govt, sponsored specialist didn't really want to know, although he was sympathetic and thought the 100mm loft insulation between loft floor joists plus loft boarding was probably as good as I could expect. The problem I have not yet solved is where the sloping roof matches the sloping ceiling inside leaving about 75mm of space which may or may not have fibreglass blanket in it. I tried filling from above with expanded polythene beads but they gradually find their way out at the bottom and through the soffits!
Any other ideas
giltech