How do I make my house warmer?!

[FreiasBathtub]

About to enter our third winter in late 1920s built semi-detached NE London house. It's bloody cold. And, I presume, pretty bad for the environment/our pockets in terms of energy efficiency.

It's single skin brick so cavity wall insulation impossible. Loft conversion apparently also means that roof insulation is very difficult (according to husband, whose job it was to look into this) and the space beneath the floor is too shallow for underfloor insulation (my job). Double glazed throughout, new-ish boiler.

We have very little money just now but hope that in 3-5 years we will have a bit more wiggle room. What can we do in the short/medium/long term to improve our energy efficiency and stop us freezing to death while working from home for the next few months?

Thank you!

If its only single skin you need to try and insulate the walls. So wall, battens, insulation and the plasterboard. It's the only way really.

Do you have central heating op or any form of heating? Or is it you can’t afford to run it?

You can insulate the outside and then render over the top, or do something inside but then you lose room space. When we had a garage conversion they put up a stud wall next to the single skin wall them stuffed it with kingspan insulation. We lost 3-4 inches of room space but it was required by current building regs.

Cheaper things - carpets, rugs, thick curtains, draft excluder on front door, new radiators, dehumidifier instead of opening windows.

We lived in a cold house for years. Threw money at it and the two best things I brought. A heated blanket for watching TV and working at home and an electric blanket for the bed.

If it’s cheap you need then we did- light the fires/use blankets/extra jumpers/thermal curtains and draft excluders

The next best thing we did was move out, We still talk about the winters we had there many years later.

Put aluminium foil insulation underneath ground floor carpets. It's easy to do, and cheap (buy by the roll). Also put behind any radiators on external walls.

Gosh thanks all! This is very helpful. Bluntness we do have central heating and can afford to run it, thank goodness! Just would prefer not to be spending quite so much on it (and aware it's terrible for the environment).

We are in this house for the long haul so I think that in the long term we'd quite like to do a full-on retrofit to get everything sorted at once and not create new problems (e.g. ventilation). But that feels very overwhelming, and financially we are quite a few years away from being able to afford it.

These are really helpful tips for the interim. I'm feeling pretty cross with myself for not noticing all the assumptions on the EPC when we bought this house... many of which subsequently turned out to be completely wrong!

You say new-ish boiler but how old are the radiators? Our old ones are totally crap compared to the new one we had put into DDs bedroom. We bought a plug in oil heater for our front room last winter to tide us over but plan to have an extra rad put in eventually.

You local council building dept will have lots of information on retro fitting old houses for insulation.

I agree in the short term about electric blankets.
You can also buy electric mats to go under rugs.

We are single skin. Only thing which fixed it was a log burner.