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Published on September 29th, 2023
A healthy home is one that operates with a top level of insulation, ventilation, heating and air tightness. This ensures that your home is not only good at lowering your bills and carbon emissions, it's good for your comfort and your own health too.
What is a healthy home?
A healthy home is one that operates with a top level of insulation, ventilation, heating and air tightness. This ensures that your home is not only good at lowering your bills and carbon emissions, it's good for your comfort and your own health too.
We talk a lot about a healthy home, this ideal house that benefits its inhabitants because of its comfort and quality. But in order to fully understand what a healthy home is it helps to contrast it with an unhealthy home, and also understand how like your own health your home needs to be regularly monitored and looked after.
Much like going to the doctor to get a diagnosis, our customers come to us in order to understand how their home’s currently performing, where it can improve and what those improvements would do for its well-being (in this case its energy performance rating, and in turn the value of the house after making these changes).
Once we’ve diagnosed what your home needs through our Home Energy Assessment and given you the next steps and timelines in our Home Energy Plan we can then project manage the energy efficiency changes. This gets your home to a full bill of health. Once we’ve made the upgrades we then offer aftercare and monitoring to ensure you receive the return on investment you’ve made and that your home’s health continues in tip-top condition.
If you’re looking for advice on how to make your property more energy efficient you can book a home assessment with us, where an accredited surveyor will tell you exactly where your property can be improved and provide you with a plan on how to take the property forward and make it more energy efficient. You can book an assessment here.
Contents:
To paint a picture of an unhealthy home and to give you an idea of what to look out for here are 6 symptoms what could indicate your home’s health isn’t what it could be:
You might find that your kitchen is warmer than your living room, and you might put that down to your oven and appliances, but it could be worth checking if it's not an insulation, boiler or piping issue.
If you have one particularly cold room there’s a few things you can check first to guage your home’s health:
As important for your home’s health as insulating your home, sealing off cold channels is vital to making your house more energy efficient. With older properties this is a common issue where there’s only single glazing and pipes and walls haven’t been replaced or mended.
A way of finding draughty outlets, aside from feeling them, is by looking for cracks of daylight through closed gaps in windows, letter boxes and doors. You can wet the back of your hand and put it by the crack to see if you can feel anything coming in.
Draughts can lead to aches and pains if you sit in the way of them for too long. The cold causes muscles to contract and stiffen and can lead to further illness. Showing your home’s health is also important to your own health.
You can use caulking, putting plastic strips around the edges of the window, as a quick fix to reduce draughts. Replacing entire doors can also dramatically reduce draughts.
Another important diagnosis of an unhealthy home is condensation. If you’re waking up each morning to find condensation on your windows then it’s a sign they’re not retaining inside heat. The condensation forms when warm, moist air from inside your home meets a cold surface like your window and condenses into water.
This water can run down the window to create mould along the frame which damages the window and can be bad for your respiration. It could force you to replace the windows altogether further down the line so anticipating this it might be worth replacing the windows with double glazing - saving yourself some time and money.
Usually the insides of your walls shouldn’t be cold as they’re not in direct contact with the elements outside, that’s the job of walls outside. But if they do feel cold then it may be that there's a ‘cold bridge’ where an internal element is in contact with an external element.
This is typical in homes built over the last century where walls were built with an internal and external layer, with a gap in the middle. Cavity insulation can resolve the issue of cold air being transferred between the two, it’s a relatively straightforward task if done correctly, filling the cavity (or gap) with blown in mineral fibre.
A symptom of your home’s health that only appears once a year if that, but a big symptom nonetheless is melted snow on your roof. All heat escapes through the top of your home (unless you live in a middle floor flat), but the right amount of insulation can limit escaping heat - keeping it in with you. The telltale sign of poor roof insulation is seeing a home with melted snow on top. Typically healthy, well insulated homes will have a full layer of snow on the roof (should you get decent snowfall), this is because the insulation stops the heat leaving the inside of the house to melt.
If you have poor roof insulation, this melted snow can travel down into your gutters and if you get particularly cold winters the water could freeze forming a kind of ice dam. If this blocks water from escaping off of your roof then it can cause problems with draining away unwanted water.
This might sound obvious, but it's often the most immediate sign of your home’s health not being tip top, is having higher bills or energy consumption than you’d expect. If you feel like you’re using a lot of energy to heat your home to a reasonable level, it could be down to energy inefficiencies around the property.
Smart meters can help provide valuable data around energy usage, showing how much you’re spending on energy in real-time. If you notice after heating you notice jumps in the amount you're spending when you turn the heating on or run hot water, it could be worth looking at where the energy is going.
2. How we diagnose your home’s health
Like any doctor would examine a patient and their symptoms we need to assess the health of your home and analyse where it can improve. This comes in the form of a home assessment. A home assessment involves an accredited surveyor spending 1-2 hours assessing your home and talking to you about your priorities for eco-home improvements.
The information they compile will go on to form your Furbnow Home Energy Plan and details the jobs you need to be carried out, their cost, and the timeframes for putting them in place. We can then arrange the work to be carried out for you or can leave it with you.
Here’s what you can expect to do down on the day of the assessment:
The surveyor will ask questions about your ambitions for your home, how long you’d like the work to take and the kind of budget you have to work with. They’ll also give information on the kind of disruption the work would cause and what the work would look like.
This is formally known as the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) and gives the surveyor a detailed breakdown of the energy efficiency in the house. SAP looks at how much energy your property is using when providing a specific level of warmth and comfort. It breaks this down by room, provides a rating which also takes into account your fuel costs and the emissions of your home.
The surveyor will also do a ventilation report that’ll look at things like windows and cavity’s to see how much water and air is passing though your home.
This all takes about an hour or so, and the surveyor can show themselves out so you can get on with your day.
Once you’ve had your assessment this information is then sent to a retrofit coordinator who compiles the data into an easy to understand dashboard which outlines your home’s energy rating, it’s areas in need of improvement and the jobs
3. Improving your home’s health
Improving your home’s health can take a number of forms. You could make DIY changes of your own or get contractors in to look at a specific element of your home.
At Furbnow we believe you should take a whole-house approach if you can. This has the highest impact in improving your home’s health as it takes into account all the interacting parts of the home, from the fabric of the property to the generation and ventilation to ensure they work together to create the ultimate level of energy efficiency. It also means you only have to have the builders in just the once.
Here are the key areas to focus on to get your home’s health to wear it should be:
Upgrading the insulation in the walls, attic and floors is one of the most effective ways to reduce energy consumption. Insulation can help keep the home warm in winter and cool in summer, reducing the amount of energy needed to heat or cool the home.
Air sealing is the process of sealing gaps and cracks in the building’s structure (Be it windows, around doors or cracks in the wall). By doing so homeowners can reduce energy loss and improve indoor air quality. This can have knock-on effects too for your own health, with less draughts and breezes you can avoid aches and pains or coughs and colds.
Not many people have checked their boiler themselves in the last year, but often an inefficient boiler is the route cause of higher bills and inefficient energy consumption. A tip from us is to see if you can lower the air flow, often boilers can heat a home on a lower air flow than is set by the installer. Although generally it’s worth getting these checked by a professional or upgraded to a newer model. The government’s boiler upgrade scheme (BUS) helps lower the initial cost of these installations.
Upgrading to double or triple glazed windows can significantly reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer, not only avoiding discomfort for yourself but also contributing to lowering your energy bills.
Solar panels (or if you have the space turbines) can harness the natural energy from the sun, rain or wind providing you with your own source of low cost energy. The only cost you pay is the upfront cost of installing the generation in the first place. After this the energy you generate should contribute to lowering your bills as you produce your own. It’s also a clean source of energy meaning no emission from what you generate.
4. What a healthy home looks like
As we mentioned a healthy home is one that operates with a top level of insulation, ventilation, heating and air tightness. This ensures that your home is not only good at lowering your bills and carbon emissions, it's good for your comfort and your own health too. Let’s break that down a bit further.
What good insulation looks like:
Good insulation has multiple benefits for your home’s health and your own health.
It includes consistent temperature control, which is achieved by preventing heat transfer (heat leaving your home) and maintaining interior comfort all year-round. Energy efficiency is also a defining feature, significantly reducing your energy costs by reducing the amount of heating and cooling you need to maintain a comfy temperature around the house. This in turn reduces your energy bills and your carbon emissions as you use less energy to power your home.
Good insulation also reduces air leaks, ensuring drafts and cold patches aren’t a thing in your home. Its moisture control properties avert condensation and mould, preserving indoor air quality and structural integrity.
Noise reduction is an added benefit, keeping the sound from outside, outside (and if you’re planning a party you shouldn’t keep the neighbours up either).Insulation also provides more durability to your home, keeping your home’s overall health at a higher level. Top insulation delivers comfort, cost savings, environmental responsibility, and lasting performance through meticulous installation and maintenance.
What good ventilation looks like:
Primarily, good ventilation means that you have high quality outdoor air coming into the home which in turn is good for your own, human ventilation. Good ventilation also reduces the amount of moisture built up in a home, the kind of moisture that leads to mould and mildew, and damp which can cause structural damage. And is, in many ways, the most visible sign of an unhealthy home.
Good ventilation often includes good filtration too, so you can keep out pollutants if you live in a built up area with traffic. Ventilation should also help your home become more energy efficient as it remains cooler during hotter days and helps retain heat while also having fresh air come in on colder days, so you use less energy to heat and cool your home, again reducing your carbon emissions and your bills.
What good heating looks like:
Nothing is so central as heating when it comes to home health. Having an efficient heating system is often the first thing people think of when they consider their bills and home comfort. And it’s true, the better the boiler the less you should be paying to heat your home.
This efficiency could come in the form of a modern boiler or it could be a heat pump. A heat pump is considered more efficient as it generates more energy than it uses by taking natural outside energy (from the ground or air) and powering your home - cleanly. Just make sure you have the right piping, radiators and insulation to make the most of a heat pump if you get one.
The knock on effect is also in creating a warm comfortable environment for yourself that benefits your own health. If you’re less cold in winter or hot in summer, you and yours are capable of living a more fulfilling life, showing the intrinsic link between your home’s health and, yes, your own health.
What good air tightness looks like:
Top quality air-tightness means you aren’t losing heat out of your home. Which means you’re spending less on heating it in the first place as the heat is better contained. It also means that you aren’t getting hot, humid air from outside coming in in summer, so overall you’ve got a nicely regulated house.
Again this means better comfort for you and your family as you have a maintained level of heat. It also means that your bills are lower as you generate less energy to get your home to a certain temperature, which in turn means less carbon being emitted from your household.
The wider benefits are that you have a more comfortable living space, which is better for your health and that your home is less likely to succumb to creaks and breaks from air getting into the fabric of the house. This means you’ll spend less on repairs in the future.
If you’re looking for a diagnosis on your home’s health you can book a Home Energy Assessment with us, where an accredited surveyor will tell you exactly where your property can be improved and provide you with a plan on how to take the property forward and make it more energy efficient. You can book an assessment here.
Written by
Oisin Teevan