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?

You might have no floor or ground insulation. Lift a floor board and it just dirt down there...or permafrost in your case.

When you do have the heating on, how hot do you have it? I’m wondering if your dh only lets it get to 18 degrees it’s not heating up fully.

could you get a log burner? (for burning non toxic logs before anyone starts saying how bad they are for the environment)

That is properly isn't it? Always have the vapour barrier on the warm side of the insulation to avoid condensation.
The insulation goes outside the plasterboard. You might not be able to fit much in the gap in which case you could lower the sloping ceiling if that's what you mean?

No you shouldn’t do that.

there are a number of potential problems, one it will block the ventilation which could cause the roof to rot, and also you could end up running in interstitial condensation / black mould / all sorts of complications.

its do it properly or leave it alone really.

Honestly, rent a thermal camera. It shows you exactly where the cold spots are in your house. We bought one for about £350 from Amazon a few years ago. It showed us that we had no insulation in one part of our loft, we have a weird roofline so hadn't ventured into that part. It showed us cold spots around our front door so we used that draught tape. It showed us where we needed to repair parts of the floor too, luckily we were planning to change the flooring but this pushed that up. We had gaps near the front door which were the worse culprits.

We never felt like we had actual draughts but knew we were losing heat somewhere.

May be lack of sun. Eg today sun was streaming into the South facing room I am mainly and with the door shut and then when it was getting dark closing the thick lined curtains has stayed quite warm but we have had the heating on from about 7pm tonight as it is cold. You may just have to accept you have to have the heating on more and at a higher setting plus use fan heaters as well in certain rooms.

Thanks @Palmasailor