Keeping the house warm

[pettyprudence]

Not sure if this is best place to ask....

Thanks to mn this year I have finally got round to putting foamy thingies around my outside doors, fitted brushes to the bottom of doors and letter box, made some snakes and put foil down the back of my radiators.

After lunch I am going to Ikea for thick material and fleeces to line existing curtains and make a new heavy curtain to go across front door.

What have I missed? Im lucky to be in a fairly modern, double glazed house (except front and back doors) but I still feel i could do more to keep the house toasty warm and minimise my heating bills. I'm in rented accom though so limited in what I can do (ie small things, no replacing central heating!)

Also any ideas on how to make a cat-flap more draft proof?

We have a very damp (we think rising damp) wall in our farmhouse. It's a granite 'cob' wall - granite on both sides, with mud and smaller stones in the middle (old cornish farmhouse).
No damp proof course, but it's mainly this one wall that is damp. The damp bit rises and falls with the rainfall.

At the moment, the downpipes from the roof drain onto a wide concrete path next to the house. the path has many cracks. So essentially the rain from the roof is draining right down the side of the damp wall. We are on heavy clay.

DH has a plan to dig a soakaway with drainage pipes/ gravel from where the downpipe drains to take water away from the house down into the ditch along the side of the garden. We were then going to give the house a while (months) to dry out before we called a 'proper' damp expert to give it all the once over. What do you think? Does this seem a reasonable course of action?

We are a bit reluctant to call in the 'professionals' straight away as there seems to be such an obvious thing to try first, and we've been badly advised in the past.

What do you think?

What are these snake things?

Gup

It's mostly people draping wet washing around their homes.

but in your case, a cob house needs a good pair of shoes. If your guttering downpipe discharges next to the house, you are feeding it with extra water. I like the idea of running it away from the house, preferably downhill. A soakaway will do but it takes a lot of digging.

I haven't had much experience of cob, but I imagine you are never going to get it really dry, you just have to balance the amount of moisture removed by evaporation and ventilation, with what gets added from breathing, showers, cooking, and worst of all, wet washing. When it was built, I expect it had draughty doors and windows, and chimneys sucking air out of the house.