Please help me understand why our house is so cold

[Guibhyl]

This weekends slightly cold snap has made me remember just how cold our house is in winter. I just don’t understand how or why it is quite so cold and what the hell we can do about it. We haven’t put the heating on yet and most of our house is around 14/15 degrees now.

It’s a 1950s three bed semi. We have all brand new windows and doors throughout, double glazed. We have bay fronted windows in the front lounge and upstairs front bedroom, but these are full bays ie it’s not a normal brick wall with a bay window but rather the bay is almost the entire width of the room if that makes sense. I’ll try to find a picture of a similar one. I know this means that most of the front wall in the bedroom and the lounge are timber framed and thus poorly insulated. About a year ago when we got the window in the bedroom replaced we got them to build the wall under the window out a bit and fill it with lots of insulation. It has made zero difference.

There is insulation in our loft, not to the standard you would have in a new build but a decent amount. We have insulated and draft proofed the loft hatch.

We have been round the house with a thermometer gun thing and can’t see any obvious causes of drafts or anything else.

The bathroom is particularly cold as well as the downstairs hallway again despite having no obvious drafts or anything.

If we put the heating on the house warms up ok, we have a new boiler and the radiators are fine, but the heat disappears within half an hour of it being turned off. In the winter if the thermostat is set to even 16 or 17 then the boiler will be going constantly trying to get it to reach temperature, it will never switch off because the house doesn’t get up that high. Therefore having the heating on for two hours in the morning and two in the evening costs nearly £10 a day. And it’s still freezing.

I’m due DC3 in January and the thought of having to bring a tiny baby home to such a cold house (our room is the coldest) is so depressing. I’m buying as much second hand wool clothing as I can. But I really want to know just why our house is so effing cold. This isn’t something our neighbours seem to struggle with. What have I missed? Any ideas?

Are any of your external walls made of single brick construction?

You need to get the house externally or internally insulated. There are grants available.

https://www.government-grants.co.uk/home-insulation-grants/solid-wall-insulation/

What's your flooring like? Do you have thick winter curtains, can you put a curtain up on entrance, exit doors?

Thermal blinds and curtains? Insulated letter box? Flooring - carpeted / rugs.

thinking outside of the box - is the thermostat on the blink? Ie it says it’s 14/15 degrees which psychologically makes you feel cold, but in reality it’s much warmer? Do you both have ‘hot’ jobs so feel the cold more? Ie a chef may feel anything below 22 degrees is cold?

Any idea of the humidity in your home? Damp air feels cooler. Recommended level is 30-50%. My 1920s house sits about 65 if I'm not running a dehumidifier.
Id prob also consider some kind of heater for the room the newborn will be in.

Do you have disused fireplaces that could be blocked up with an old pillow or newspaper?

Close curtains just before sun sets to keep heat in. I keep getting caught out as it gets dark so early now and notice a quick drop in temp.

We have thermal blinds in all rooms plus thermal curtains in the bedrooms. We have carpet in the lounge and everywhere upstairs other than the bathroom but then we have karndean everywhere else throughout the downstairs which is laid straight onto the self levelling concrete stuff so the floor does feel very cold. Maybe some runners in the hallway might help. We could also put up a big curtain in front of the door but because it’s brand new there’s no draft and the heat gun doesn’t show the door area as any colder than the wall.

The survey we had done said that we have cavity wall insulation, apparently. The builders who did some internal work for us after we moved in also confirmed this.

However the house originally had two separate front doors, one into a sort of integrated porch area and then another into the house itself. The porch was too small to be useful so we knocked through the inside door and the outside door is now our front door if that makes sense. The brick around that area would have originally been part of the porch so maybe it’s not insulated and that’s what is making the hallway so cold? I don’t know if I’ve explained that properly!

Not sure of humidity. I already do all the tricks with curtains etc to try to maximise solar gain and then minimise losses. I will definitely have to get a small fan heater for when the baby is born and remortgage to afford to run it

Buy a cheap humidity monitor from Amazon. Humid air is colder plus moisture is not good for your house.
I get what you mean about the porch and that may well be a factor, the porch was acting as a buffer between the outside and inside and must have kept your hall warmer.

Have you used a proper thermal imaging camera?
You could rent one - FLIR is a decent brand.
https://fatllama.com/uk/lp/thermal-imaging-cameras

You need to use them when it's cold outside so there is a noticeable temperature difference between inside and outside.

Houses definitely feel worse if the humidity is high.

Mine feels much better with low humidity and I can run the temperature much cooler.

I am about to buy a thermal imaging camera and I second the post above - you can use it to find where the worst heat leak is.

It sounds just like our old rental except ours was 100 years older. We had three culprits: uninsulated stone walls, heat seeped straight out. Single pane glazing. 3ft voids under the house that meant the ground floor was permanently freezing. If we were lucky we could get the house 2 degrees above the outside temperature but a lot of the time the best we could achieve was 0.5 degrees, unless we cranked the heating up to 24 (which felt like 19-20), which we once did for four hours, at a cost of circa £150 in oil. Half an hour later it was back down to freezing.

I would investigate what is under the house. What your house sits on or above could be different to what yours neighbours does.

I would have the wall insulation inspected for quality and, if even applicable, wear.

Ours only held heat for a max of 30 mins and cost just as much, you really have my sympathy. Did NOT expect to read about the same problems with an 70 yo house.

It doesn't have a bunch of tall trees around it, does it?

Do you get high winds? Those make the building fabric temperature plummet.

I really wouldn't worry too much about the baby being cold. As long as she is wrapped up warm she'll be fine - we live in a freezing Victorian house and my January baby had no issues living there!

Could you poast an external pic perhaps?

@KievLoverTwo as far as I’m aware none of those apply to us. It’s a very average semi in a normal suburban road, no huge trees, no high winds, no reason to believe our house is built on anything that our neighbours isn’t. The walls aren’t stone. We have brand new double glazing everywhere. No obvious drafts. Cavity wall insulation, theoretically.

We lose a lot of heat out of our 1930’s upstairs bay windows as they’ve got hanging tiles on the front so not proper brick walls. We also lose a lot of heat out of our suspended wooden floors but we don’t have carpets.

Older houses can be cold. Our heating bill is massive and we never have it on over 19° and we have a log burner which does the lions share of heating in the winter… that and electric blankets!

Also it’s definitely not the thermostat. It’s objectively freezing, people comment on it when they come round. DMIL has taken to bringing a pair of slippers because it’s so cold she can’t stand not having anything on her feet (and we have the heating on when we have guests). DH is one of these typical men who declares it’s boiling when it’s over 18 degrees and even he is cold. We have smaller thermometers in other rooms and they all say it’s cold. When we went away over Christmas and didn’t have the heating on for a few days we came back and our bedroom was 7 degrees!

Most people build a porch to create 2 front doors for this reason to keep the house warmer.

@Youcancallmeirrelevant but everyone else in our road has done the same thing. Also presumably this was done back when doors were drafty and a way for cold air to come in. With modern doors they don’t let out much more heat than a brick wall?

The door is not drafty. It’s no colder standing next to the front door than it is standing in our bedroom or in our lounge. If anything, our bedroom is even colder.

Lack of sun - front of our house faces SW so is much warmer than back that faces NE. So no trees causing shade.
Can you curtain off the whole bay in the evenings?
concrete floor will definitely drain heat. I would put underlay and carpet down and over whole area. We had a pump in the basement and when it ran it raised the temp a few degrees. The kitchen above which has a concrete floor was suddenly warmer.

I think from your updates , I would look at flooring to be insulated
, the bay window to add some form of insulation/ thermal break and more roof insulation. Unless you don’t have cavity wall insulation or it’s settled and effectively failed ? ( wondering if surveyor is wrong )

can you talk to any neighbours and compare what you’ve got in your house as opposed to theirs, a list might highlight something non of us has thought of.

We lived in a Victorian semi for several years and it too was freezing. It was rented, so we didn't/couldn't do anything to it, but the main problems, as far as I could tell were:

1. Really poor insulation in the loft. If it had been my house I'd have put the best insulation up there we could afford.
2. Lots of single brick skin outside walls. They're just cold. The house was like a train - i.e. one room wide with a row of rooms going back like train carriages. All those cold, outside walls just chilled the entire house in winter.
3. Lack of sunlight as a result of the layout, so very little sun to warm the rooms in winter.
4. Hard floors. If it had been my home I'd have laid carpet with insulating underlay throughout the ground floor to make it warmer.
5. Damp - the kitchen was an extension that I think had been done cheaply. When I cooked in winter the walls ran with condensation, because they were so cold. I don't think there was any insulation in the walls. It also had a basement that had mould on the walls, so was clearly damp. Has your house been checked for rising damp? Do you have a damp course?
6. Inadequate heating system with radiators under windows.

@Guibhyl I still think you should investigate what is under the house. Irrespective of whether it's a normal suburban semi or not, the way you are describing it to me feels like an underfloor problem.

Have you ever lifted up the floorboards to see if there is any insulation down there? I would do that.

I take it that it is square, not T or L shaped? The more external walls there are exposed, the colder it will get.

Look into Rockwool thermal lining paper.

Is the loft insulation the best you can get, and in good condition? Ideally, you should have 30-40cm thickness in a house that is painfully cold.

Have you been up in the loft when it is windy and held your hand across various places to check wind and other weather is not getting in through the roof?

One more thing - after living in that cold, damp house we then built our own home. Yes, it's a modern construction, but it's also super-insulated. We barely have to have the heating on in winter, because the insulation is so good. I now believe that most cold homes are due to poor or lack of insulation.

Do your neighbours have the same issue.