On 15 Apr 2006 09:08:11 -0700, "Tournifreak"
wrote:


Mike Halmarack wrote:
On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 15:03:54 GMT, "Mark" wrote:


Mike Halmarack ... wrote in message
.. .
To lag these pipes properly would mean pulling up a lot of
floorboards.
Does there really need to be quite so many air bricks allowing such a
cold draught in a floor of this type, at this level?

Yes, unless you want to kill your house and yourself
Google "blocked air bricks" and "health risk damp spores"

Thanks for the cautionary tips. Maybe there's a moderated air flow
achievable the will have the required anti-damp damp effect, without
carrying away quite so much heat. Perhaps an adjustable louvered vent
in place of the fixed louvres.

I don't get it. Very few houses have airbricks at first floor level.

I must check, it'll give me an excuse to get out more. :-)

But a few do around this area. So why is it necessary for some houses
and not for others? Was it just a short-lived idea sometime in the
early 20th century? I'm sure someone on here knows...

Jon.

I can currently only guess at the structure of this 1984 built house
and I'm not going to take it apart to any great extent to check. Other
than membranes etc. it seems to be a box with plywood sides surrounded
by a cavity, then a single skin of bricks. Just below the ground
floor, on two sides of the house there are 6 air vents which are
ducted through the cavity and an inner skin of blocks. These ventilate
the under floor space including the exposed floor joists of the ground
floor. By doing this, they don't seem to be ventilating the cavity.

The 2 air vents at 1st floor level may not be ducted, so they might
only be ventilating the cavity directly.

The first floor is a multi-compartment box, with floorboards above and
plasterboard below the compartments are formed by the floor joists
which aren't likely to be weakened much by cut out vents. The joist
ends finish at a timber wall plate of the same size to complete the
box effect. So where the stiff breeze comes from I still don't know
for sure.

I don't know if the
--
Regards,
Mike Halmarack

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