I felt a breeze around my ankles

SITTING in my living room, I feel a chilly breeze around my ankles.

But it wasn’t until I pointed a thermal imaging camera at the floorboards of my semi-detached house in Maidenhead that I realised it was helping drain my bank account too.

As temperatures fall outside, some properties quickly lose warmth and this means our heating is cranked up and bills rise.

Heat loss around the home could add more than £1,000 a year to your energy bills, according to the Energy Saving Trust. 

I borrowed a thermal imaging camera from Octopus Energy to find out where her home is losing heat.  

The energy provider offers free one-week loans of the gadget to customers who are struggling with bill costs. 

You could also be able to borrow cameras through your local council. For example, Southwark Council in London lets users borrow the tools through its The Library of Things in Canada Water. You’ll just need to pay a membership fee, though concessions are available for anyone who needs it.  

The camera is really easy to set up. You just need a smartphone and to download the FLIR ONE app. 

It took me just a few minutes to get it all running. 

The camera inside my home shows warmer areas as yellow, oranges and reds while colder areas are a darker blue and purple colours.

When you take the camera outside, the red and orange areas on the image show where heat is leaving the house. 

A big rug

I have wooden floorboards downstairs instead of carpet. When I pointed the camera at my floor in the living room, you can see how much colder the floor is compared to the rest of the room. 

When I take a rug from another room and put it down on the floor tucking it underneath the sofas, you can clearly see the difference in temperature compared to the edges.

I’ll definitely be investing in a couple more rugs to cover more of the wooden floor. They can easily be rolled up and put away in the summer.  

My flooring doesn’t have gaps but if you do have them, these tiny cracks can let in cold air. 

You can use sealant to help plug up the heat loss. A tube of wood flooring sealant is £5.99 from Screwfix and can be used between skirting boards and floor as well as on gaps in flooring. 

There is no insulation underneath my floorboards, they are on wooden joints with air bricks built into the bottom of the exterior walls to keep them ventilated and stop rot. 

Phil Steele, is a future technologies evangelist from Octopus Energy.
His role is to stay on top of design and innovation within the home energy sector. 

He says: “There are digital airbricks now available that can open in the day for air circulation and close at night to help stop draughts. 

“It’s a relatively easy retrofit, costing around a couple of hundred pounds.”

I’d never heard of these gadgets, but digital airbrick firm AirEx estimates that it can reduce heat loss in homes by around 12 per cent. 

Door draught 

When I point the camera at my front door, I can see a strip of dark blue at the bottom indicating that a lot of heat is escaping there. 

I have a draught excluder which covers the bottom of the door and when it’s there, you can see that the dark heat loss area disappears.  

I sometimes use a draught excluder at night but don’t think to use it at other times, but the difference in the images has encouraged me to start using it throughout the day. 

Plugging draughts around windows, floors and doors can save £85 a year on energy bills, according to the Energy Saving Trust. 

I don’t have a modern front door, it has single pane glazing within one layer of wood. 

You can see through the camera that it is colder than the surrounding walls, especially the glass, showing that heat is leaking from the rest of the door, not just the bottom.  

Getting a new door is a pricey solution to the problem.

But a door curtain is a cheaper and easier fix – you can get them from around £15 from Dunelm. 

Seeing the images through the thermal camera, I will be adding one to my shopping list. 

My letterbox and key holes don’t appear to be a particular problem but in some doors they can be. You can get letter box covers for around £5 if yours is an issue. 

Curtain call

I have double glazed windows in some parts of my house but not all. 

In my hallway the double glazed window overlooks my side path so I don’t usually bother to close the blind. 

However, when I point the camera at the window, I can see that it is cooler than the surrounding areas and letting heat escape. 

Just pulling down the blind, makes a big difference to the heat loss. 

The heat loss from the window is even more pronounced on the single glazed windows in my home. 

However, I have thermal curtains in my bedrooms so closing them is an easy way to block cold air entering my home.

I also shortened my curtains so they don’t block heat from the radiator just underneath. 

If you have thin curtains, during the winter you can attach liners with safety pins. These cost around £12 from Dunelm. 

When I take the camera outside, you can also see the heat loss from all the windows, especially those that are single glazed. 

Getting double glazing is a big investment, typically costing up to £5,000 for around six to eight windows. 

Another trick is to use a secondary glazing film, a roll is £6.50 from Wickes. It is just attached over the window and stuck on with double sided tape. You can take it off over the summer and reattach each winter. 

And, as with the skirting boards, you can also use sealant or putty around the edges to plug tiny cracks or crevices. 

Phil also says on my single glazed sash windows I can attach little brushes where the top pane meets the bottom pane to help stop heat loss. These self-adhesive brush piles are around £2 on the internet from a specialist sash window retailer sdhardware.co.uk.

Lofty ambitions

My loft hatch and, surprisingly, the areas where my lights are in the ceiling on the top floor of my home show up as darker areas on the camera. 

Lofts are not usually heated and are much colder than the rest of the house. 

The hatch lets warm air escape from the house but I was surprised that the lights in the ceiling that go through to the loft have the same effect. 

Phil explains that these holes through the ceiling act like “little mini chimneys” letting the warm air escape.

Insulating the loft hatch to help heat from escaping is an easy job, you just attach an insulation board on the loft side. A 1.2m-wide board is £40 from B&Q. 

It’s a fire hazard to add insulation at the back of ceiling mounted spotlights. But Phil tells me you can add a box to go over them in the loft which helps stop the heat loss.

We found one of these ‘loft lids’ for just under £5 from downlights.co.uk.

You could also save by further insulating your loft. If your current insulation is around 120mm thick, increasing to the 270mm, which is the minimum recommendation for new builds, could save you around £20 a year on energy bills, according to the Energy Saving Trust. 

Bricking it 

The thermal camera clearly shows that my exterior walls are a lot colder than the interior. 

Unfortunately, they are solid single brick layer walls so getting extra insulation is difficult.

More modern homes may be built with two layers of brick that can be insulated with cavity wall insulation. 

Getting cavity wall insulation could cost from around £1,500 a year, but will then save around £370 a year, according to MoneySupermarket so you could make up the initial outlay within a few years.