My cavity wall insulation is still debatable

Really how blimmin' hard is it to work out if you've got cavity wall insulation?

Having avoided it for years for fear of having to tidy all the rooms in the house - not realising of course that they're insulated from the outside - I only started to look into it last week as part of my ASAP pledge. And although I'd rather be doing far more exciting things like the washing up, I'm on a mission to get this thing sorted.  After all, according to the Energy Saving Trust around 30% of heating can be be lost through the walls of an uninsulated home, so it's well worth the effort!

But before I decided to bother a company that specialises in such matters I thought I'd call our housebuilder to enquire whether they'd installed cavity wall insulation when they built the house seven years ago. Of course, I might have remembered myself if I hadn't been too busy at the time counting the number of halogen ceiling lights we wanted to have fitted in the new build.

"I don't know." said the man at the end of the phone when I called the Taylor Wimpey office.

"Can you find out?" I replied.

"Yes, we'll ring you back." came the uninterested reply.

That was two weeks ago and I haven't heard anything since. I rang again last week, spoke to someone else and got the same reply.  How can it have taken so long for a housebuilder to find the answer? Surely even a computer could say Yes or No. They must have known at the time, whether through policy or building regulations.

I feel like I've hit a brick wall.

However, this is only a small brick wall compared to some that others have faced recently.  While I'm busy debating whether I've got cavity wall insulation, a friend of mine who pitched a sustainable programme idea to a national broadcaster found herself being told by a defiant commissioning editor that "Climate change is debatable".

Now that's some brick wall indeed.   As a non-expert on these matters, I simply hope that those who say it is debatable actually use it to open a debate rather than close it.

But for now I'm looking at the smaller picture at home and knowing that cavity wall insulation save us fuel usage and money, well that has to be a winning strategy all round.   And after avoiding it for months, I'm now more determined than ever to get it sorted, even if it comes to drilling a hole in the wall.

Now where did I put that drill....