House Critic

Court ruling ounmarried couples’ property rights

During a hearing in May, the Supreme Court heard that ice-cream salesman Mr Kernott, 51, and Ms Jones, 56, broke up in 1993 after sharing the house in Thundersley for eight years.

The couple bought the house in 1985 in joint names and took out a joint mortgage. It was valued at £240,000 in 2008.

When Mr Kernott moved out, Ms Jones continued to pay the mortgage.

The Black & Decker TLD100 Thermal Leak Detector is a great gadget for anyone interested in draft proofing their home and ensuring it’s as warm as possible. As heating bills go up and up – with new rises on the cards for many customers in January too, you’ll find saving money by insulating is more and more popular.

Whilst this gadget isn’t really cheap it’s not horrificly expensive. Maybe if you clubbed together with neighbours or even family you could buy it, and all use it to find cold spots in your home.

It’s available at Amazon UK – Black & Decker TLD100 Thermal Leak Detector
and if you buy today will be with you in a couple of days helping you track down places to top up insulation.

This gadget helps you identify issues with the insulation in your home and you just point it at the walls, floors or doors and watch the light change. It’ll go red if the temperature increases – so when it goes over lights that are on it’ll go red. When it finds a cold spot it’ll go blue. You can see the light clearly so you can move it along all the floor edges, doors and window seals to check them out. It’ll help you track down drafts, cold spots and all those places where heat escapes from your home.
If you can cut down on the amount of heat that escapes your house will stay warmer and your heating bills will be less!
It will indentify both hot and cold drafts around your home.

It just needs one 9-volt battery.

This is a tool you will use around your entire home to improve the insulation and draft proofing. If you want to save money on energy bills then this gadget will help you.

There’s another video of this being used I think is well worth looking at. The lady making the video looks at the gap around the door, the bottom of the door and the walls and the window in her kitchen. Whilst she sees to her suprise the blind keeps up the temperature she’s spotted a cold spot on her wall in the top corner which might be due to a bit of cavity wall insulation being missing.

This is something I have asked many times – how do you know the cavity wall insulation is installed properly without viewing with a heat camera? You don’t! And perhaps there’s a need for this being checked in most houses. You can under the guarantee ask them to come back and have a look but they would probably just pump some more in rather than checking whether there are gaps as the only tool to do this is an IR camera.

Stopping up drafts in floorboards has been done in a numbver of ways over the years. Some people make paper mache with newspaper and squeeze it into the cracks. Some use sawdust and glue to give a good colour match.

Now there’s Stopgap – something invented just for filling gaps in floorboards. You just put it in and push it down and it forms an invisible barrier.

Find out more about them and how to fit stopgaps at their website