My trade is marketing for trades businesses. I’m a DMI Certified Search Specialist, and for the last two years I’ve run the marketing for a pest control firm. Day to day, that means reading what worried homeowners type into Google, what they’re told when they ring round, and where the two don’t match up.

That gap is where people get caught out. Not usually by crooks. By prices with nothing behind them, rules nobody explains, and options the person quoting has no reason to mention.

I’ve never pumped insulation into a wall or sucked it back out, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I can do is the bit most people don’t have time for: dig out the numbers, read the rules at the source, check them against people who do the work, and lay it all out plainly.

The coldest house I’ve lived in was my friend Ben’s, a big old place in Doddington, the part of Whitchurch where the bank managers and head teachers used to live. Four storeys, a basement, a coal fireplace in every room, and rooms you could lose a sofa in. My bedroom was on a corner, with two walls that had nothing on the other side but Shropshire weather. Lovely in a period drama. Freezing in February.

When we lifted the floorboards there, we found newspapers from when John F. Kennedy was still president. They’d been lying under the floor since the early 1960s, waiting for someone to catch up on the news.

My dad’s house is in Coton, a little village on the road from Whitchurch to Wem. It’s over a hundred years old, solid walled, and it has its own story: the hole at the bottom of the garden. Family legend says a German bomber heading home from a raid, possibly on Liverpool, dropped its last bombs to lighten the load, and one landed in what’s now my dad’s garden. I can’t prove a word of it. Liverpool was bombed heavily in 1940 and 1941, and there’s definitely a dip down there that looks like something went off. That’s as far as the evidence goes.

The point is that old houses hide things. Newspapers under the floor, rubble in the walls, possibly a crater in the garden. Nobody knows what’s inside a wall until they look, which is why I keep going on about getting a camera into the cavity before anyone quotes you.

• The source, not a summary. Guarantee rules come from CIGA’s own pages. Wall checks from the Energy Saving Trust. Exposure zones from the BRE and NHBC. Each one is linked where it’s used.
• More than one price. Cost guides disagree, so I show what each one says and when, rather than picking the tidiest number.
• Real quotes over guesses. I’m asking working extraction firms to price the same houses. Their figures replace the published ones as they come in.
• A date on everything. Prices and rules change. If a page says “checked October 2026”, that’s when I last checked it.

I also write The Spray Foam Report, which does the same job for spray foam in the roof. Same method, different bit of the house.

When you ask for quotes, I pass your details to extraction firms that cover your area. If a firm pays me anything, it’s a flat fee for each introduction, the same for every firm. So I’ve no reason to push one firm over another, and no reason to talk you into extraction you don’t need. The numbers would give me away anyway.

I don’t work with compensation-claims companies, and I never pass anyone to one.