The Costs Of Cavity Wall Insulation Removal – Is It all Worth it?
You’ll find yourself enlightened with all things regarding the costs of cavity wall insulation removal after reading our article. If you want to know the reasons behind having your cavity wall insulation removed, look no further, we’ve got you covered! Not sure if having your cavity wall insulation removed is actually worth it? No rock shall go unturned in this article as you’ll learn the approximate prices for small, medium, and large cavity wall insulation removal services we offer here at First Choice Energy, and you can also compare the prices with the potential damage costs to your home caused by the failing cavity wall insulation.
What's in this article?
What is Cavity wall insulation removal and why do I need it?
Let us begin. Unless you’ve read our Ultimate Guide to Cavity Wall Insulation Removal, you may not have a hide nor hair as to what a cavity wall is. Please, allow us to enlighten you, or jog your memory, if needs be. As per our Ultimate Guide, a cavity wall is two separate walls making up the exterior of your home. These walls have a small gap of about 75mm between them, thus providing layers to your home, these layers being called skins, and doing its best to keep the cold and moisture where it belongs- outside, while allowing proper ventilation for your house. Additional insulation, or an extra layer of skin to your home would be cavity wall insulation. This would consist of pumping the little gap with materials like mineral wool, polyurethane foam, or carbon beads. While, when done correctly of course, these have many benefits, in failure, cavity wall insulation can actually cause more damage and cost for you than what it took to have the insulation installed…
But why do I need my cavity wall insulation removed?
If your cavity wall insulation is failing, it needs to be removed, it’s in your best interest, trust us! Whether if it’s because it wasn’t installed correctly, i.e., the installer not adding a bonding agent to your carbon beads, the location of your house is inappropriate, i.e., coastal areas of the UK, or the materials used for the insulation of your house was pretty poor (not naming any names, *cough* mineral wool and polyurethane foam *cough*). If you don’t have your insulation removed it can, become damp or begin sagging or clumping, these symptoms of cavity wall insulation failure can affect your health and cause expensive damage to your home.
How much cavity wall insulation removal costs us?
It all depends really! There are many factors affecting the price of a cavity wall insulation removal, these include the size of your property and how much of your home’s insulation needs to be extracted, these then would influence how many days of work is needed, how many team members are needed to remove the insulation from your cavity. Alternatively, you could also think of the heavy machinery our team would use to perform the removal. Let us have a little breakdown.
- The borescope:- a little camera used to inspect the inside of your cavity wall, costs between £190 and £300
- Compressors:- these provide energy for the extraction machine, costs around £6000 or around £500 p/w as a rental.
- The cavity wall extraction machine:- (no explaining needed for what this does really), costs between £4,000 and £6,500, depending on its power.
- SDS Drill:- for the external wall of your house, can cost between £550-£1000.
- Transit van:- As we will be towing a 800kg compressor, a large powerful van is needed. This can cost between £9500 – £24,000.
These prices are without mentioning travel costs, appropriate uniforms, and the cost of hiring a team to help too, it’s quite a lot when you think about it.
How much cavity wall insulation removal really costs?
Small Sized House
The smallest cavity wall extraction job (and all sizes are welcome!) our company could expect is perhaps one face of a 2-bedroom end of terrace house. This could easily be a two-person job, providing of course, the insulation isn’t too clumped around your brick ties. If all goes well (and it normally does here at First Choice Energy Ltd!) you’ll have an insulation-free wall within a maximum of five hours, this will then cost you around £1,500.
Medium Sized House
An example of a medium sized cavity wall extraction job for you would perhaps be a semi-detached, 4-bedroom house or a detached, 3-bedroom bungalow, with all available faces needing cavity wall insulation removal. Two of our team could do this, but to provide the most efficient, top-quality service for you, three members of our team would be deployed. As a company we understand how important it is for you to have the job done as soon as possible and as neatly as possible, so our passion for providing the best service will be worthwhile and will put you at complete ease as our customer! A job like this with three members of our team would take only one day, but with only two members of our team would take around a day and a half or two working days, this would cost you between £2,500 and £3,000.
Large Sized House
So, you’ve got a big detached 5-bedroom home? That is a pretty big job we must say! However, it’s no problem and First Choice Energy would still have absolutely no problem in providing you with a fantastic standard of work! In order to give you the top-quality work you deserve, a minimum of three members of our team would take this on and would take about a day and a half to 2 working days for full completion for such a big (but worth it!) job. This would then cost you about £5,000.
How much financial damage can failed cavity wall insulation cause?
Plastering and painting
To begin with, your failing cavity wall insulation will eventually cause damp and mould in your home. This will result in you having to re-do your living room every eight months because your plaster has blown, what’ll that be? £500/600 every year! That is, until you finally decide enough is enough and have your cavity wall insulation removed, if it happens once, it’ll happen again!
Heating Bills
Yet another way your cavity wall insulation could be causing you to spend unnecessary amounts of money is through energy bills. Yes, you heard right! The old saying goes- ‘no insulation is better than wet insulation’, and it’s correct too. You could be paying up to twice your normal heating bill, trying to overcompensate for the heat that’s being lost through your failing cavity wall insulation, or the extra cold brought through your walls by its rising damp! Have you noticed you’re paying a little more than you should for your heating recently?
Brick ties & Render
That’s not all! You could be in for a massive bill if you brick ties get involved! One thing a failed cavity wall insulation can do to your house is clump and sag on your brick ties, or even worse if the insulation is damp, can make your brick ties rust and expand, causing cracks in the brickwork and renders of your home! What are brick ties, you may ask? Well, they are only the things keeping your two external walls together, soooo, rusty broken brick ties and a cracked wall doesn’t sound exactly safe for you or your family, does it? At the very least for a small job of repairing a few brick ties on one face of your wall could leave you with a bill of £2,000, and with an even bigger job of replacing all of the brick ties on the whole face of a house, plus repairing any brickwork or renders, you could face a bill of a minimum of £7,000. This, of course, is without mentioning the cost of the removal of the cavity wall insulation you’d have to get to make all of the repairs worthwhile.
Failed cavity wall insulation can also cost your health
These are only the things, that would cost you money, failing cavity wall insulation could also cost your, or your family’s health! Have you noticed you may be feeling rather headachey, sneezy, or you may have had a few more chest infections than normal? As we’ve said before, ‘don’t blame the cold, blame the mould!’ mould and damp can seriously affect your health, especially those who are more vulnerable to illnesses, such as those with asthma, autoimmune diseases, and respiratory diseases. It’s just not worth it, really, is it?
So, is it all worth?
After all that, I think you can agree with us on one thing, failing cavity wall insulation really is no good, and it’s time to put you, your family, and your house first and have it removed!
