As winter sets in, you want to be protected and warm in your own home. This shouldn’t be a luxury, but an absolute essential for a modern Australian property.
If you’re looking for smart, eco-friendly ways to warm up your home this winter, your floor might be a good starting point! Overall household warmth is strongly linked with the level of insulation and energy efficiency your property currently offers, so your goal is to stop internal heat escaping through the floor.
The feeling of being cold at home during winter is truly awful. The icy tiles. The gaps in your floorboards sneaking in several-degree-cooler air. The huge pile of thick socks to wash! Your home should be your escape from the outside world. But draught excluders, inefficient portable heaters, and hot water bottles are all too commonplace in today’s Aussie home.
According to the Australian Energy Foundation, our country has an epidemic of inadequate, sometimes non-existent, home insulation. They also point out that Australians spend 90% of our lives indoors on average, but we are punishing ourselves by feeling the winter cold much more than Americans or Europeans.
The solution to this? Yep, investigate and install better insulation! Improving your home insulation situation is easier than you think, and we suggest taking a closer look at the possibility of insulating your floor.
“A polished timber floor looks warm and inviting, but looks can be deceiving. If you’ve got a suspended timber floor which is not insulated, it can contribute to as much as 20% of heat loss during winter.”
– CSR Bradford on underfloor insulation.
It’s agreed among household heating and energy experts that top-quality underfloor insulation is a great investment not only for your pocket, but for the environment too. If you live in a house currently without underfloor insulation, you could be losing around 20% of your heating/cooling capacity. However, a house with underfloor insulation can cut its energy bills by an attractive sum, especially during the colder months.
Underfloor Insulation vs Underfloor Heating
People who live somewhere like Scandinavia, in a cooler, Northern hemisphere climate, consider floor heating an absolute necessity to increase their comfort levels (and hygge!) at home. Yet, without decent underfloor insulation, even underfloor heating can be less effective. There is simply no point creating warmth internally without first ensuring all that warmth can’t escape.
And that’s the entire purpose of “insulation”. It’s like a great, big, bear hug from your home, protecting you from the outside elements.
If you currently have underfloor heating, but have not considered or even pursued a quote for underfloor insulation, this should be a priority before going deep into winter. You may be missing out on half the benefits of the system you paid to have installed!
Is it worth insulating the floor of my home?
If you care about reducing your impact on the environment at a household level, the answer is a simple “yes”. Underfloor insulation products are manufactured from thermally-bonded carbon polymers (polyester) – so they are environmentally friendly and ideal for use under timber floors, amongst other options.
Installing underfloor insulation to keep your home warm during winter does depend on a few variables, including whether there is open access under your house and floor joist spacings. It also depends on whether there is crawl space available and enough “headroom” below your floor surface – we are ideally looking for at least 600mm clearance.
To check if your flooring could be improved with insulation, you can try to put your head under the floor through a manhole kind of entrance to explore the space available and look for any existing insulation… but it’s best to leave that to the experts! Check if your house is suitable for insulation by requesting a quote from an experienced insulation professional.
With well-installed floor insulation you will enjoy the following benefits:
- Lower household energy consumption
- Decrease greenhouse gas emissions – environmentally friendly!
- Save on your electricity bills
- Improve your comfort levels
- Fight that cold feet feeling
- Reduce the presence of surface mould
- Minimise your reliance on heating and cooling systems
The right product for your situation
If you live in an older property, there is a chance you have older insulation materials in your flooring, ceiling or walls. This material may not meet current standards covering the insulation industry, which specify the R-Value requirement in your climate zone. This is a strong indicator that it’s time to replace and refill your cavities with the proper stuff – the eco-friendly stuff!
Houses built pre-2000 are likely to have a rating of around 1.5 Stars. With ECO Home Insulation, you can make a plan for increasing your rating to 5 or 6 Stars, giving you maximum benefit for your investment.
Polyester insulation batts are ideal for underfloor insulation – this is what your pillows and doonas are often made of! Their design makes them easy to install and adapt to a variety of spaces within the typical home (so they can also be used for roof or wall insulation, if needed). It’s known in our industry that polyester copes well with moisture, odours, and hot or cold temperatures compared to other underfloor insulation products on the market today. Polyester is also great for its hypoallergenic qualities, so a smart option if you have asthma sufferers in your family.
At ECO Home Insulation, our underfloor insulation material is manufactured by CSR Bradford, a long-standing Australian company and approved insulation partner of the National Asthma Council Australia. Their polyester bats are always designed for both comfort and energy efficiency.
Key benefits of polyester underfloor insulation include:
- Completely free of added chemicals (like formaldehyde-based binders or fibres)
- Reduce energy costs through winter by minimising heat loss
- Unaffected by moisture, mould or mildew
- Naturally resistant to vermin
- Non-flammable material
Create your own ECO Home Insulation Package
We want to make it easy for you to surround your home with a bubble of warmth this winter – and every winter afterwards! Underfloor insulation is a great option, but you need to determine first if your home is equipped for it.
Quality underfloor insulation will ensure your inside floor matches the same temperature as your indoor temperature – toasty! The whole idea behind installing floor insulation is to avoid walking on flooring that is the same temperature as the earth around you, which, during winter, can be quite toe-numbing.
And what about that “harming” leopard print dressing gown of yours? With underfloor insulation and internal heating this winter, your home will be a tropical jungle…so you can probably go ahead and send it to charity.
