Property CareHome › A warmer, quieter home
Warmth you already pay for, kept indoors.
Most cold houses are not badly heated. They are badly sealed. Before anybody sells you a new boiler or a heat pump, it is worth stopping the warmth you already pay for from leaving through gaps you could cover with a finger.
Where the warmth actually goes
- Draught-proofing external doors, including the letterbox and keyhole nobody thinks about
- Sash and casement windows sealed properly, without stopping them opening
- Floorboard and skirting gaps closed in older houses, where the cold comes up rather than in
- Loft hatches insulated and sealed, one of the worst offenders in most homes
- Loft insulation topped up to current depth, and moved off the eaves where it blocks ventilation
- Pipes and tanks in cold lofts lagged before the first hard frost
- Secondary glazing where replacement windows would be wrong, unaffordable or forbidden
- Chimney balloons and dampers for open fireplaces nobody uses any more
- Radiator reflectors on external walls, and radiator shelves that push heat into the room
- Heavy curtains hung properly, on poles fixed into something solid
- Cold spots investigated honestly, rather than guessed at
- The room that is always freezing, finally explained
Comfort first, and no greenwash
We sell comfort, not carbon
Lower bills and lower emissions are both real and both welcome, but what you actually notice is the sofa by the window becoming usable in January. That is the thing worth buying.
Cheap things first
A £40 draught excluder that works beats a £4,000 measure that theoretically works better. We start at the bottom of the cost ladder and stop as soon as you have what you wanted.
Houses need to breathe
Seal a house completely and you get condensation, then mould, then a worse problem than cold. We seal draughts while keeping the ventilation a building genuinely needs, which is a distinction plenty of people miss.
What we will talk you out of
We do not fit boilers, heat pumps, solar panels or cavity wall insulation, and we have no commercial interest in any of them. That makes us unusually free to say when they are the right answer, and unusually willing to say when they are not.
If your house needs a heating engineer rather than a draught excluder, the honest advice is to spend the money there, and we will tell you so before taking a penny. Equally, plenty of houses sold expensive measures would have been transformed by a weekend of sealing and a proper loft hatch.
The wider argument is in the Book of Care: extending the life of what already exists is usually the most sustainable thing available to any household, and it rarely involves a subsidy scheme.
A whole-house draught-proofing day, covering doors, windows, floors and the loft hatch, is around £550 plus materials. Loft insulation top-ups typically run £400 to £900 depending on area and access. Secondary glazing is quoted per window. Most households find the first day pays for itself within two winters.
The services on this site are starting points rather than a menu. They can be combined, taken apart, or reduced to the single job you actually want doing. If all you need is a curtain pole hung, a patch of damaged wall made good or a sticking door eased, ring and ask for exactly that.
Which room is always cold?
Start there. Tell us the room, the house and roughly its age, and we will tell you what is most likely happening and what it would take to fix.