Why did we give up on insulation?
Why did we give up on insulation?
I just watched some video about Yakutsk Siberia which is meant to be the coldest city in the world. Thought "Those poor bastards, wonder what they need to wear indoors when it is -40 outside."
Turns out a pissing tank top and PJ bottoms. We really need to start demanding better things in this country don't we?
I'm also reading a book about coal mining. All the unpaid labour, minimising wages and dodgy things the bosses did then still happens now. Now I'm not a tankie so don't get the wrong idea here. But why are we all okay living like this I don't get it? Why is the UK population so forgiving at living it shit conditions.
Also I'm going to jump in before anyone says no insulation keeps you cold in the summer. Insulation works both ways, it can keep heat out or it can keep heat in. It's better in the summer and in the winter.
Siberia video in question:
https://youtu.be/K0z7Avc9ZtY?si=_KTob2YYMn2HLwkv
Also I hope I havent broken any rules. I can't see any. This seems mostly news posts but I guess text posts are allowed? Sorry if not.
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Heating the past few decades (or even century) was simply too cheap. Cheaper than insulating on the short term.
In cold countries, they didn't have this option. they had to insulate.
Proper insulation is best done when building a house. Afterwards, it's a little bit more complex.
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This is the answer. We're addicted to cheap short term pretty things. Why insulate your home when you can spend the money on a week in the Costa Del Shag and then flip your house for a nice profit without doing anything to improve it?
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As an outsider, I offer the following theory: it's cultural.
Brits are conditioned by the media and each other to suffer and wear that suffering like a badge of honour. This is the country that pioneered the battle tactic of having soldiers just line up in an orderly fashion to get shot and have their countrymen just step over them to take their place afterall.
I'm still in awe of a conversation I found on Reddit when I first came here. A Polish guy was asking why the homes were so poorly insulated: "I'm Polish", he said, "I'm familiar with cold weather. This is deliberate suffering". He was berated at length for being "weak", that he should "just put on a jumper and shut up". In the same thread, someone actually referred to carpeting as insulation.
Worse still, you seem to have no idea who to properly blame for that suffering. You keep electing kleptocrats and aspiring fascists and turn your nose up at anyone who points out that your suffering is the direct result of said kleptocrats. You passed on one guy 'cause you fell for lies about him being "extreme", "a communist", and "antisemitic", and you passed on the one before that because he ate a sandwich funny.
What you do excel at is scapegoating. It's the immigrants. It's the poor. It's anyone but ourselves and the kleptocrats we elected.
This is why you can't have nice things. Recognise that you're part of the problem, demand better leaders, and stop being so fucking stupid at the polling booth, and maybe then you'll get better results.
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Nah think I’ll brexit mate.
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Yeah having lived throughout the US (including about as far north as you can get in the 48) I was shocked to move to Scotland and be freezing cold all the time. I've never had to wear so many layers in my own home. Plus utilities are literally an order of magnitude more expensive. As soon as the heat turns off the room immediately cools down. Its insane
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Sorry, not in the UK, post popped up on "All".
You guys don't have insulation requirements?
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You landlord when you talk about what they need to do in regards to mould or insulation in your house.
My last place wouldn't let me go into the attic to see what insulation was up there and on the energy certificate the guy wrote "assumed" for the attic. Now sure there is a really low minimum level as a landlord and sure there is a free money given to you from the government if you install good insulation in the attic. But what's the point? It's just so much effort to make a couple of phone calls. It's far easier to just add to the contract that the tenant needs to heat their house sufficiently to prevent mould, no excuses. Then it's not your problem!
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I suspect it’s more that the requirements are lower and the buildings are on average older than in Yakutsk, which contribute to less effective insulation.
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We absolutely do, on new properties, and on change-of-use.
And we have requirements that rented properties have to at least hit a certain level. As wanderer says below, because of the state of the rental market, there are a lot of shitty landlords just ignoring what they can. -
For new builds, yes. But some houses in the UK are really fucking old. I lived in a house built in 1791. It didn't have any insulation and, due to listed building regulations, only had single glazed, wood framed windows.
There's a bit of contention between preservation and modernisation in that sense.
I still think it's a bit of a con with new builds as you get insulation but the walls are only a brick length thick generally.
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Alaskan here checking in. Most of the housing here is what we call stick frame, and it's usually framed with 2x4" spruce. In case you don't know 2x4s aren't actually 2 inches by 4 inches as they plane off the rough stuff so they're really about 1.8 x 3.8" if memory serves.
That means your outer walls usually only have 3.8" of space to stuff insulation between the outer barrier and the Sheetrock inside. Unless you use spray foam insulation which is more expensive, so most builders don't do that, so the cheaper insulation at that thickness isn't great.
I now live in the first house I've had with 2x6" framing, and let me tell you, that extra 2 inches makes a world of difference.
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Spent a winter in a semi in Manchester. Coldest winter of my life due to no insulation and the constant draft.
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To bear in mind, in all the cold parts of Russia, apartment blocks are communally heated; one big boiler heats the whole block and never turns off. It's to stop any chance of someone forgetting to put the heat on and flooding the place with burst pipes
Plus their energy is stupidly cheap
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Plus their energy is stupidly cheap
Iceland has no boilers and it's still communal heat.
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Why stupidly, it just cheap 🤷♂️
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Don't get your knickers in a twist Ildar, it's just an expression
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Another person who found you from all, so probably not welcome to comment, but on the chance I am...
I always wondered about this! It does work both ways. Every time there's a heat wave that kills some of your elderly, I'm constantly shocked because where I live (US Deep South) we hit crazy high temps for extended periods of time and lose fewer people. With our population being insanely high compared to y'all I just... can't with that.
Makes me want to come over there, develop a way to retrofit your homes, and get to work. Climate change means you'll have more unbearable heat and more unbearable cold moving forward, not less!
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I thought the material used in the US wood, gypsum, etc made insulation more essential compared to stone/brick construction often found in Europe.
Can’t recall where I heard that thing so take with a huge grain of salt
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Depends a lot on the construction and age, but there's really no type of construction that doesn't need insulation.
There's a specific UK issue though. For some reason they're falling behind and have been for some time. F.i. The rest of northern Europe are using triple or quadruple pane windows, while many houses in UK still have single pane windows.
The windows alone being 2-3 generations behind code is only part of it. Loft insulation is also far behind:
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Most houses in the UK have double glazing. Not all (somehow - if there isn't a grant for that there should be!) but by now most have upgraded.
Triple glazing appears to be getting started, I got a free upgrade to triple when I upgraded!
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As an American that has lived in a brick construction I can say that the drywall/insulation combo is significantly better. It's also possible that the brick apartment where I lived was just old and shit though.
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It was old and shit. Brick houses can get amazing insulation. I know this, my family owns such a house in Romania where the temperatures can dip to -15 degrees in winter. Absolutely no problems inside.
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Ideally the best insulation is the least dense as density typically relates to thermal conductivity. Where stone/brick really helps is in raw mass, if you've ever been in a basement you'll kinda know what I mean. It'll flatten the temperature changes and make it more stable but if it's always hot or always cold it's not great.
The US has mostly rock wool or fiberglass insulation and not just wood clad in gypsum. But much of the US can go from -26 in the winter to 35 in the summer. I used to live in a city with a latitude about the same as Madrid that would get to almost -30 and as high as 41. The house was made of brick but past that outer layer it had a wood frame with insulation to maintain heating or cooling.
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Bricks used in houses have big air gaps in the middle (which you can also insulate if you want to, both inside and outside.
That said you can do a lot with mass. I lived in a concrete building in a place with similar extremes and it did keep the heat very well, on account of those walls being half a meter thick. The glass windows were so bad at insulation by comparison that you could sometimes feel a breeze coming from the panels even when they were fully sealed just because the inside air was dozens of degrees warmer than the glass.
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People build housing to the specs their environment requires. The UK has extremely stable moderate temperatures so doesn't put the extra cost into insulation or central cooling.
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Not really true. UK definitely has a history of under-insulation compared to other European countries with similar climates (like Denmark for example).
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Last time I was there visiting a relative I was shocked to find that the "mailbox" was just a hole cut on the door. Like, it was raining outside and they just had a big hole on the front door, which itself was just a wooden plank. May as well have blasted the heating straight out the window.
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There’s sort of an urban legend in Sweden that ”The silly Brittons who don’t understand insulation feel sorry for Swedes that can’t afford to heat their houses so the snow melts of the rooves”. Are you saying that’s true?
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It's more that construction has been incredibly short-termist for too long.
A huge amount of housing was built post the second world war. Very quick and not of high quality. We needed a lot of it and we needed it cheap because we were pretty close to broke.
High rise social housing came along and was again, prefabricated concrete with a short design life. Expected to be used for at most 50 years then replaced. After all, the 60s expected tomorrows home to be better, why build to last 100 years when it will be advantageous to build again.
Public sector building existed up until the 70s but it was about volume and designed to get us to the next point where we upgraded that stock.
Then the 80s happened and we never upgraded the stock. It was instead sold off to the private sector and when they rebuilt it, they were also deregulated.
Any house today has a design life of 25 years, the length of the average first mortgage.
We're even echos with austerity starting in 2010. Schools built as a quick fix in the 60s, with a 30 year design life, slated late for replacement in 2010, then the funding removed due to cuts by our current government.
Turns out they've got RAAC roofs which cave in without warning when they're more than twice their design life.
Grenfell is a disaster caused by taking a building built to the lowest bidder as a quick way to provide housing. Then tacking on insulation to the outside. Our construction sector is so deregulated this insulation was highly flammable and hundreds died as a result.
The result is we choose older buildings because survivorship bias means the crap built in the 1930s and before has already gone. If we buy old enough we get well built homes designed to be heated by fires and stoves.
Fires generally kick out more heat than is needed to heat a room, so insulation to keep that in just made the house too hot to have a lit fire in the UK. Originally they were insulated enough to leak the correct amount of heat.
Retrofitting these old houses with more controllable heating and insulation is difficult.
But buy a newer house designed with a newer heating system in mind and you'll find it's trash quality. Possibly even dangerous and completely worthless when a revelation about building materials comes out.
TLDR: British people aren't stupid. Houses from the 1700s, 1800s and up to the 1930s were built to last as long as possible. Newer property wasn't.
Left wing governments built cheap and got voted out before renewing stock. That's all end of design life now built 1945-1979
Right wing governments from 1980 deregulated construction so very little built since then is of good quality. Some of it simply dangerous and now worthless.
STLDR: We understand insulation. Our governments don't.
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spent the holidays on the continent in a nice warm flat. didn't even need a jumper. now back in a cold drafty flat built 70 years ago. why can't we have nice things.
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(text post is fine :) )
I would say that we haven't. However, we have a lot of old housing that needs improving.
As someone who's been spending too much time on building work at the moment, the current regulations and requirements for insulation are not that light. (Approved Document L, if you're interested)The specifications are written in W/(M2-K), or watts of heat lost per meter squared, per degree delta from one side to the other.
New dwellings have to hit:
- External walls: 0.13wmk
- Roofs: 0.11 wmk (that's about 330mm of glass fibre insulation, or 160mm of PIR board)
- External floors: 0.13
Or to put this in perspective: A 30 M2 roof on a new house, on a 0 degree day, with an internal temperature of 20 degrees should only be losing 66W of heat per hour.
An older building retrofitted with 100mm of insulation (effective wmk of 0.4) would lose 240W
An uninsulated roof (2.5wmk) would lose 1500W.
The ECO plans are trying to fix this in older properties, and they're honestly pretty well thought out (they target the lowest hanging fruit, to get the best effect for the money spent). But things take time, and ensuring the work is done to a good standard costs a lot of money.
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We really need to start demanding better things in this country don't we?
I am pretty confident that if someone in the UK wants to build a house with Yakutsk-level amounts of insulation, that's an option. But the UK doesn't get Yakutsk-level temperature extremes -- what it makes sense to do differs.
Out here in California, I am sure that the earthquake resistance of our houses is probably way higher than that of most houses in the UK. But...we also get large earthquakes on a not-wildly-infrequent basis, so it kind of has a need to be that way. You could go build a British house that could stand up to that, but what's the point? The UK doesn't get huge earthquakes, and it costs more to do that.
Same thing for wildfires. We have a bunch of restrictions on things like growing foliage near buildings. The UK doesn't really have a serious problem with fires, so the need to mitigate fire risk is much-less-serious.
On the other side of things, I'd bet that a lot of places in the UK are far more-capable at dealing with snow than where I am. Lot of flat roofs that would deal poorly with snow buildup here.
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People in the uk don't build houses unless they are loaded.
They either more likely rent a house that has the worst insulation imaginable or they buy a house that's 100+ years old, or they buy a new house which is built be a developer and has a reputation for being worse quality than a 100 year old house. Plenty of people in this country live by the phrase "I'd never buy a new house" new heard anyone say they wouldn't buy an old house.
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That's probably not because of good insulation, but just because of central heating system in most of the apartment buildings
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Interesting video, thanks