What are the Biggest Causes of Heat Loss in the Home?*

When your home is losing heat, it isn’t just getting cold that you need to worry about, you also need to worry about the inflated heating bills that you could have avoided. Energy charges are notoriously always increasing, as energy supply companies continually raise fees so the best place to start when it comes to reducing energy costs, is by understanding where your heat is being lost. The next step is then to introduce energy saving solutions such as insulation or looking at a wide range of underfloor heating kits.

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Where is heat lost in the home?
In terms of percentages, the average home loses heat through the following ways:

35% of your heat will escape through the walls in your house.
25% of your heat leaves your house straight up through your roof.
15% will escape through your flooring.
15% of your heat loss is attributed through your doors and drafts around them.
10% of the heat will be lost through your windows.

Windows
Of course, these figures are based on averages and these will vary greatly depending on the energy efficiency and energy saving measures of each home. So for example, if a home has new double-glazing that offers really high levels of energy efficiency it will lose less heat through the windows than a home with old, single-glazed windows

One good way to help prevent heat from escaping through your windows is by using thermal curtains as they can provide a barrier to prevent heat from being lost this way. If you have light curtains, or ill-fitting curtains that have gaps at the top or bottom then you will be losing excess heat this way.

Walls
The biggest problem of all is probably going to be your walls, mostly because this is the area that has the highest area of contact with the outside. Again, how much heat your home is actually losing through the walls will be dictated by the structure of your walls, with some being more energy efficient than others.

Most newly built houses have cavity walls where insulation can be injected into the walls. Houses that are older have solid walls so this is not an option for energy saving. Cavity wall insulation can be done quite cheaply so it is a good way to reduce your heating bills. For solid walls, more expensive solutions are available such as cladding to the outside of the house or installing internal wall insulation that will reduce some of the space you have as it makes the room dimensions slightly smaller.

Flooring
Your floor could be a big source of heat loss but adding insulation and installing underfloor heating can go a long way. Underfloor heating can save you on your heating bills because it is energy efficient and also tends to have much lower maintenance costs than other types of heating. Also, having floors that are made out of more energy efficient materials, along with effective insulation will reduce the amount of heat lost through your flooring.

Doors
The materials used in your doors and how well sealed they are will play a big part in determining how much heat is lost this way. Modern double-glazed doors with really good seals around the frames will considerably reduce the amount of heat that you lose through your doors.

Roof
As you probably know, heat rises so the direction it is moving in will be upwards towards the roof. If you have a poorly insulated roof then you could be losing even more than 25% of your home’s heat this way. Depending on the type of roof you have, there are a few different options that you can incorporate to insulate it, from adding mineral wool between joists to rolls of fibreglass that provide an effective layer of insulation to prevent heat from escaping. Foam board is another popular way of insulating ceilings.

The sooner that you look into the different ways of reducing your heating bills, the quicker you will start to benefit from the savings. So now that winter is on the horizon, now is your ideal opportunity to assess the energy efficiency of your home and look at the different money saving measures you can start to implement. Investing in thermal curtains or wall cavity insulation are both low cost solutions that you can introduce easily. Other solutions like underfloor heating might not turn out to be as expensive as you might think and given that the costs are off-set against your future energy bills, it really can make a huge difference to your long-term energy costs.