How to make an old house warm?

[Meltinthemiddle]

My house was built in 1920's and only has single brick walls. Despite having central heating in every room the house takes ages to warm up and never seems to retain the heat l. We have double glazing and some insulation in the loft. However we are also suffering with damp and condensation. How can I make it warmer and more energy efficient. It's cost ling me a fortune to keep warm.

Exterior insulation, or interior insulation on all the external walls. There are a few ways to do this, none are cheap.
If you don’t love it, wait until summer and sell it.

Oh, and go mad on the loft insulation.

Our house is well over 100 yrs old and we also have trouble getting it up to temp. We find it easier to heat rooms I.e. curtains across doorways and heavy curtains on windows to keep heat in. It does mean that the other rooms (kitchen!) is very cold but once your cooking etc in there it does get warm, or rather I do
I'm sure others will be along with some better tips soon!

A desiccant dehumidifier would help. It will take the moisture out and blow out warm air.
We have one upstairs and one downstairs. About £170 each and fairly cheap to run.

Thick curtains, door curtains and draft excluders will help too.

Thank you will definitely invest in curtains and draught excluder. I may look into external insulation. I do love my house but I hate being cold.

I was reading about insulating around your skirting boards. Apparently it’s a key heat loss area (partly because plaster often isn’t taken all the way to the floor). If you use draught excluders all around your room it will make a big difference, particularly on external walls.

Rugs, thick curtains, soft furnishings also help

Retrofit exterior or interior wall insulation. Check your loft has up to date thickness of insulation. Stick foil behind radiators. Check where drafts are and block them.

To stop mould you must air the house regularly, even in cold weather. Dehumidifier will help too.

As well as the ideas above, consider if the heating system also elderly? (Obviously not from1900’s!). Our boiler is relatively new, but the hot water pipes carrying water to the radiators are old-fashioned narrow ones - so they don’t get enough hot water to run all the radiators hot enough. We’ve fitted thermostatic valves to adjust how much water each one takes, and bleed radiators frequently.

Older houses were built at a time when it was normal to heat the person, not the house - so chairs around the living room fire rather than every room heated to 20C. To an extent, it makes sense to go with that - the house doesn’t need to be uniformally warm, the people in it do.

If you already have damp and mould be very careful of interior or exterior wall insulation. This often impairs breathability by applying modern materials to old houses, akin to putting a plastic bag over your house and keeping all the moisture in.

I second dehumidifiers - I have a desiccant one, use it in the room I dry washing in and that room is noticeably warmer with it on.

Thick curtains down to the floor are brilliant too. Loft insulation between loft floor joists (never spray foam - a scam).

I think with old buildings you have to use a big blast of heat. Do you have a fireplace or stove. Even with CH my place is chilly unless I light the stoves.

I think that and eliminating drafts, is what made the biggest difference to our Edwardian house after we bought it. When we moved in, which was a January with snow on the ground almost 15 years ago now, the house never felt properly warm, even when the heating was left on all day, unless it was sunny as well.

But we doubled the amount of loft insulation (don’t then cover with boards as that just compresses it and reduces its insulating property), stuffed pillows up the chimneys that weren’t used, draft proofed the orignal wooden single glazed sash windows and doors and put up blinds and thick curtains. That made a huge difference, and the house would get up to 22C with no problem at all. Keeping interior doors closed made heating up the house quicker.

A few years later we replaced the boiler and radiators with modern ones (the originals were probably early 80’s) but kept the orignal pipe work. It was then possible to get the house up to 25 degrees if we wanted to.

Cost-wise it was a diminishing return. The insulation and draft proofing initially probably cost less than £1k and made a big difference. Blinds and curtains were around £10k (a lot of windows, and we could have spent a lot less) made it feel cosier but didn’t really raise the temperature much. The replacement boiler and radiators was around £8k a was very effective, but we didn’t really need to heat the house to 25degrees.

In our last place, a very old house we had a double sided log burner so it would heat the kitchen/diner and living room in one go.
We had two sets of thermal curtains on each window and wool carpet fitted everywhere. A new boiler made such a difference and much more efficient. Also proper loft insulation. But the cheapest thing that was effective was that draught insulation tape that you put around the doors and windows.

identifying draughts really is key. So much of the heat we generate is lost.

Please do not externally or internally insulate your walls if your property is a single-skinned 1920's home!

With all due respect, those types of remedies can be ok for newer properties, but will, in the long run, be disastrous for yours!!

Properties your age need to breathe, otherwise you will suffer terribly from mould and condensation. The constitution of older bricks are more permeable and if you wall-insulate, moisture will not be able to escape from the bricks and the walls will sweat.

Draught exclude, thick curtains over windows and external doors, rugs if you have wooden floors and ventilate every day. Only 20 mins or so, but it will make all the difference. I live in an early 1900's home and working with reversing some modern building "improvements" that were made and gave resulted in excessive moisture within the home.

Modern building techniques and materials used on old buildings cause more moisture related problems than anything else.

Do you have a suspended wooden floor? If so, insulating under it can be a big help. If you can get under there to do it it's not beyond basic DIY (though it can be slow and dirty). If you can't get under it, it means taking the floorboards up. (If you actually replace a large proportion the floor, I gather you need Building Regs approval.) PS Don't block any underfloor vents, they are what keeps the underfloor dry!

I second this, from experience of a 1920s house. We did insulate two rooms inside where the old lime plaster had been removed, but they were double skinned walls with a cavity and we stood the insulated plasterboard off the brickwork with battening to mainatin ventilation.

As mentioned above, interior or exterior wall insulation. Insulate, insulate, insulate. Most efficient double glazing and insulated and sealed doors/frames you can afford. People forget how draughty doors can be. Chimney balloons up every open chimney. If you have under-floor voids you can fill them in and install underfloor heating, which is generally cheaper to run.

But when you've sealed a house that was designed to be draughty you'll get condensation and damp, so then you'll need to use dehumidifiers or mechanical ventilation and heat recovery to keep the place dry and fresh.

So in the meantime as well as using heavy lined curtains and using papier-mache or some other insulation to fill gaps between exposed floorboards and skirting boards I'd bite the bullet and use supplementary heating such as oil-filled radiators when it's really cold for a few weeks in the year at a cost of maybe £50 a week for the worst winter months, or improve your central heating system with bigger radiators, or install a woodburner. Or you can spend £25k-100k bringing the place up to something like best standards of insulation and ventilation.

I work in this field and it's gradually dawning on people that epc graphs do matter when looking at a property to purchase and that buying a beautiful old house with period charm can be a very expensive prospect.

If you don’t like being cold , invest in a wood stove , the amount of heat they kick out is fantastic , I was living in a 1900 victorian terrace ( midsize one ) when the beast from the east was on us a few years ago , It kept the house warm on its own ( running 24/7) without the central heating on. It was a clearview and imo are the best stoves going. The house had never been really warm until we fitted it. If we didn’t open all the doors to the rest of the house I’m sure we would have died of heatstroke 🥵

I've been thinking of getting a wood burner in the kitchen dinner as that's the coldest room in the house. Will definitely look into it. Lots of things to thing about as was thinking of external insulation opposed to internal.as thought that would be better.

@pattihews ”I work in this field and it's gradually dawning on people that epc graphs do matter when looking at a property to purchase and that buying a beautiful old house with period charm can be a very expensive prospect.”

Yep. Come spring the stories of the cost of heating an old house will be hitting the headlines.
Personally I’d never buy a solid wall house unless it had been insulated professionally.
You can see why the government is introducing minimum EPC ratings on rental properties.
It would be nice if the did the same with private property at point of sale.

I highly recommend you join the FB groups below. They are run for and by people with period homes, most of whom face the same issues that you do (me included in our wattle and daub 15th century house!) Lots of advice about condensation, heating, log burners, etc, and knowledge of what works and doesn't in an older house.

I Love My Period House!
Traditional and Listed Building Advice
Your Old House UK - Repair and Conservation

Thick interlined curtains make a big difference.

Great thank you!

I am afraid that the only real solution is to move to a modern house. I live in an old house and am a member of some of the Facebook groups above and there was some joking going on earlier about the maximum temperature it was possible to reach. If you are going to make any improvements (and you can make some, but it will always be a cold house by modern standards) please educate yourself first as there’s a whole industry out there conning people into spending money on solutions that create more problems. Start here www.heritage-house.org/

My house is old and beautiful but quite frankly, as I get older and ready to move for retirement, I will be buying somewhere modern again.