Between a rock(wool) and a hard place

-
CIGA agreed that my insulation needed to be removed, but then took no responsibility for it! I pointed out that it was an illegal install into a narrow cavity and repeated it 3 times before they replied:

Despite your references to a less than adequate cavity width this has no relevance to the lack of maintenance which has resulted in compromised insulation and internal décor damage.

What does less than adequate mean? Inadequate. Here are some other words from the thesaurus entry for inadequate : -  deficient, faulty, incompetent, incomplete, lacking.

I asked them if I could remove the material myself and then claim the cost back through arbitration.

"The CIGA guarantee covers the insulation in your property, once the cavity wall insulation has been removed there will no longer be a guarantee on your property.

If there is no guarantee on the property the arbitration process isn’t available."

This is insane. They know there is a problem and the internal deco will get worse over time, wall ties may be subject to accelerated corrosion and every day it's in there is a day that the cavity is not being dried out over summer. Yet I cannot take reasonable actions to protect my home from further damage without risking abandoning the 'concerns' process.
If you have a fire in your house, you don't resolve it by spending weeks on the phone to the insurance company negotiating , you call the fire brigade.

Comments

  1. isoflex28 August 2019 at 03:51

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The controversy over Cavity Wall Insulation 'topups'

-
Image
In this article I talk about the practice and problems of topping up insulation when voids are discovered, why it is being done and the potential violations of building regulations. I can only put forwards what I have understood from public documents and personal correspondence  So I welcome corrections or clarifications from the industry on this important issue for home owners and will happily update this post to reflect any inaccurate statements. We know that 100s of topups are done every year.   From what I can gather : If the BBA have not approved these topups then the relevant local authority building control should have been notified prior to topping up as an 'off licence' use of the product.  It is not clear that the correct procedures are being followed in all cases. Background :Voids are common A void is simply an area cavity between the walls which is missing insulation.  If a void is large enough then the insulation will not be compliant with t...
Read more

What happened to CIGA's damning google reviews?

-
Image
Until recently when you searched on google for CIGA or cavity wall insulation you would be greeted by some information on the right hand side of the page which included some google reviews of the business (and a photo of some bloke...anyone know who?). Among those were classic reviews which mirror our experience... Clearly the number of negative reviews should be a clue that there was something wrong with the customer service of this organisation responsible for guaranteeing more than 6 million homes. In a bit of a dirty move, CIGA's leadership decided to address these reviews not by reaching out to satisfied customers for feedback or to find out from affected customers how they can  improve their customer service. Instead their thin skinned solution was to declare their business as closed on google maps/business which had the effect of removing all user's reviews. Searching for precedence it seems that this is a common tactic of dodgy traders who change the n...
Read more

CWI, Impermeable masonry paint, hard cement and breathability

-
Image
Waterproof or let's call it plastic masonry paint made with silicone or acrylic sounds like a fantastic idea to keep that pesky rain away from the wall. Unfortunately it can easily cause the opposite in terms of moisture management and inflict devastating damage to old solid walls which were originally made with a breathable building envelope. This article serves as a discussion to highlight some of the unexpected problems which show up in the real world verses the limited testing of the BBA certificates and I welcome discussion from anyone interested in this subject. For a good 'primer' on the problems associated with plastic paint in solid walls, Peter Ward from Heritage House has a number of videos of detailing the sacrilege caused by often well meaning tradesmen applying these aggressively marketed products. I recommend watching all his videos especially if you are having any sort of damp problems so that you can avoid the multimillion pound interventions sold by ...
Read more