This insights piece is by Calum Farquhar, Director of a PAS 2030 accredited installer, and retrofit coordination on funded jobs sits with a qualified external PAS 2035 coordinator, at Insulation Installers Scotland.
A wall insulation claim rarely lands on a desk at handover. It lands two winters later, when a policyholder calls about a smell in the back bedroom or mould behind a wardrobe, and the company that fitted the job has often stopped trading by then. Handover looked clean: board up, wall skimmed, job signed off. What nobody could see was the moisture starting behind the new lining, with nowhere to go.
That gap between handover and claim is the real difficulty in this class of loss. By the time damage shows on the surface, plaster and paint are only the messenger. The damage sits in the timber, joist ends and skirting backs, running wet for months before anyone smells it. A damp patch on a bedroom wall is often a claim about structural timber, once an adjuster takes a closer look.
The attribution problem
Working out what caused the moisture is harder than it sounds. Penetrating damp from a failed gutter can look much like condensation from poor ventilation, which can look much like interstitial moisture behind a badly designed or badly fitted internal lining. A meter reading and a report calling it “damp present” settles nothing. It doesn’t say whether the design could never have dried, whether the fitting cut corners, or whether the damage has nothing to do with the insulation.
That distinction decides who pays. Get it wrong and a design failure that should sit with whoever specified the build-up gets billed to an installer who fitted the wall as instructed. Or a workmanship dispute, missed laps in the vapour control layer, gaps behind the board, gets treated as a structural claim that should never have reached an adjuster’s desk. Plenty of these jobs carry a TrustMark-backed guarantee, and the claim belongs with the warranty provider, not the buildings policy.
What the technology can actually show
Thermal imaging is usually the first tool anyone reaches for, and it earns its place when used properly. A camera run across an elevation on a dry, cold morning, after a spell without rain, shows cold bridging and sometimes the patch where moisture has raised a wall’s thermal conductivity. Run it in the wrong conditions and the image shows noise dressed up as evidence. A survey costs a few hundred pounds; a bad liability decision built on it costs far more.
A borescope goes further, letting someone look inside the cavity rather than infer from the surface. A small hole through the lining shows whether the board is fixed tight to the wall or bridged with an air gap, whether the insulation has slumped, and whether the masonry behind is visibly wet. On internal wall insulation done properly, the board is scribed to the wall face and the vapour control layer runs continuously across every join; a borescope often confirms it.
A single moisture reading taken on survey day tells you the wall is wet. It doesn’t tell you whether that reading is falling, holding steady or climbing, and the trend separates a wall drying out from a wall failing. A data logger left in place over a few weeks shows the direction of travel a single visit never can.
The most useful tool for a contested claim is a transient hygrothermal simulation, WUFI-type modelling that tests how a wall behaves over years rather than a single day. Run against the as-built specification, not what was meant to happen, it answers one question: could this wall, built exactly as it was, ever have dried out? Moisture accumulating year on year regardless of workmanship means a design failure, and no careful fitting would have saved it. A build-up that should have worked, still failing, points to the installation instead. That single distinction is usually the whole argument, and running the model costs a fraction of a wrongly attributed remediation.
The paperwork is evidence too
None of this technology replaces the paper trail, and on a scheme-funded job that trail should already exist. Work under PAS 2030 or PAS 2035 leaves a lodgement record: a risk assessment, a specified build-up, an installation checklist signed off against it. Jobs funded through ECO4 and other current schemes are also logged on TrustMark’s data warehouse, an independent record of what was installed, by which company and scheme. A retrofit coordinator’s design file sits alongside both.
When that trail is missing, it tells a loss adjuster something in itself. Sometimes the job was private work outside any scheme, so PAS never applied, changing the liability picture on its own. More often the assessment behind the specification was thin or skipped, because the scheme priced it in hours and the paperwork was the first thing cut. Where the trail exists, the claim usually belongs with the warranty provider.
The Public Accounts Committee reported in January that more than 30,000 homes carry defective solid wall insulation fitted under government energy efficiency schemes. Some of that number will land as a claim, and the company that did the work will not always be around to answer for it. Insurers who treat the paperwork as part of the building, and who reach for a borescope or moisture logger before guessing, price the risk more honestly than those waiting on a generic damp report.
Be the first to comment