Thermal survey view
Street view · overcast
Drag — the same wall, read two ways
Solid-wall Victorian terraces · Wakefield · Est. 2013
Warmwell Insulation is a domestic insulation specialist in Wakefield. Twelve years on solid-wall Victorian terrace insulation, a thermal imaging survey before every recommendation — and no quote before the survey.
What happens next: a visit, then a written report. Not a sales call.
Est. 2013 4.7 / 5 · 76 Google reviews £5m public liability 25-year guarantee on cavity fill Survey + written report before any quote
Sheet 02 — The diagnosisWarmwell Insulation · Wakefield
Most of Wakefield's terraces went up between 1880 and 1910, and their walls are nothing like the walls most insulation advice was written for. There is no cavity. A solid nine-inch wall is two courses of brick bonded together — nothing between your front room and the street but 225 mm of masonry, and masonry is a poor insulator that soaks up your heat and hands it to the sky.
That is why standard cavity-fill advice is wrong for this house. There is no gap to inject, whatever the leaflet through your door claims — and a fair share of our twelve years has been spent removing fill that was pushed into walls it should never have gone near.
Solid walls also have to breathe. Lime mortar lets moisture move through the wall and evaporate outside; seal it behind the wrong insulation and the moisture stays put — damp plaster inside, spalled brick outside. So any solid wall insulation we fit in Wakefield is breathable, because the wall was built to work that way. The survey establishes which of this applies to your house before anyone talks about work.
Readings — typical for this wall type
| U-value, 225 mm solid brick wall, uninsulated | 2.10 W/m²K |
|---|---|
| Same wall, breathable internal wall insulation | ≈ 0.55 W/m²K |
| Share of a terrace's heat typically lost through walls | ≈ 35 % |
Typical published values for this wall type, not a quote. Your wall gets its own numbers at survey.
Sheet 03 — MethodThermal imaging survey · Wakefield
Every job starts with a thermal imaging survey — the same document, in the same order, for every house we visit. It is also how a condensation or damp survey works: measure first, conclude after.
01
Survey method
Every room, the loft, the outside walls — walked with the thermal camera at the right time of day, so heat loss shows up as a picture before it becomes a number.
02
Survey finding
Then the meters: moisture in plaster and mortar, wall build-up checked room by room, ventilation traced from airbrick to loft edge. Condensation and damp are diagnosed here — this is where a condensation survey in Wakefield earns its name.
03
Written report
You get it in writing: findings first, recommendations after, the thermal images included. The report is yours to keep — and to check us against, whoever you end up hiring.
04
Recommendation
We recommend only what the readings support. Sometimes that is insulation. Sometimes it is repointing, a gutter repair, or ventilation — and the report will say so, in writing.
Policy
No quote is issued before the survey. Ever.
Sheet 04 — RecommendationsFindings before conclusions
No packages, no tiers, no "from £X". A recommendation is a conclusion drawn from readings. Here is how findings usually resolve on Wakefield's terraced streets.
Survey finding
Heat pooling at the eaves; loft insulation thin, trampled flat, gaps at the edges.
Recommendation
Disruption is honest: a day's work, mostly out of sight, and the loft goes back the way we found it. It is usually the cheapest heat saving on this sheet — and done properly, the loft edge stops glowing at dusk.
Survey finding
Solid nine-inch walls reading cold on every internal face; no cavity to fill.
Recommendation
Honestly, this is a decorating job as well as an insulation job — one room at a time, sockets and skirtings off, a breathable build-up finished in lime plaster. Days per room, not weeks per house; walls that hold warmth instead of draining it.
Survey finding
Cold rising through a suspended timber ground floor; a steady draught at the skirting boards.
Recommendation
Boards come up and go back down — a room shuffles, not a house. The airflow to the original vents is preserved, because a suspended floor that cannot breathe rots. Warmer floors; the skirting draught gone.
Survey finding
Sash windows reading cold around the frames; a moving stream of air at the meeting rails.
Recommendation
Hours per window, no redecorating, and the joinery your house was built with stays. The rattle and the cold stream at the meeting rail stop; the window still opens the way it always did.
Survey finding
Damp patches tracking across a filled cavity wall; fill slumped and wet at the base (1930s and later stock).
Recommendation
Failed fill is extracted from outside through the original injection pattern — a day or two of noise, not mess indoors. We refill only when the readings say the wall has dried and the exposure suits it, and cavity fill we install carries a twenty-five year guarantee.
Sheet 05 — Stated limitRead before you book
If that is what the survey finds, it goes in the report, in writing — and we walk away from the job. A wrongly insulated solid wall traps moisture and ruins brickwork, and twelve years around these streets means having seen the aftermath. We would rather lose the work than cause the next one.
Sheet 06 — DocumentationCase files · Wakefield
Twelve years of Wakefield terraces leaves a drawer full of case files, each written in the same grammar: the finding, the work, the result — dated, with the readings attached.
ColdHeat
Survey finding
What the camera and the meters found — dated, in plain English, with the wall build-up we recorded.
Work carried out
Exactly what was installed or removed, with the materials named — nothing vaguer than that.
Result
The after reading, taken in like conditions, with before and after numbers side by side.
These exhibits are representative. We don't publish other people's houses as adverts, and we won't invent readings to impress you. At your survey, ask to read the case files themselves — streets like yours, with dates and numbers.
Sheet 07 — The surveyorEstablished 2013
Warmwell Insulation was established in 2013, and the specialism wasn't chosen from a list — it is what Wakefield is made of. Street after street of solid-wall Victorian terraces, all losing heat in the same few ways, all badly served by advice written for houses fifty years younger.
Twelve years of that, almost exclusively, teaches you things a general installer never learns: where an 1890s bay leaks, what lime mortar will and won't forgive, why one house in a row streams with condensation while its neighbours stay dry. The thermal camera comes to every job because looking first is the whole discipline.
It also teaches restraint. Enough of those years have been spent putting right other people's work — failed cavity fill, sealed-up walls sweating with damp — that we would rather turn a job down than cause the next one.
On record — stated as fact
Sheet 08 — The askOne appointment, not a pitch
Not a quote — a reading of your house. The survey and written report come first; a quote follows only if the evidence supports work.
We'll read the wall first.