To ASK US a questionTwin Skin Insulated Log Cabins
Insulated log cabins
Insulated log cabins are much warmer compared with other gardens buildings - our twinskins have cavities in the roof, walls and floor where various insulation materials can be inserted (we can offer 3 standard insulation specifications - anything from a hobby room right up to comply with habitational 2022 UK Building Regulations), if you want a truly all year round insulated garden room, office or even a house then our twin skin log cabins are the best choice by far (they are also known as dual walled cabins).
- This is a video of our Maidstone 4x4m Twin Skin insulated log cabin being installed. We offer polyurethane insulation (Kingspan, Celotex, etc) or fibreglass insulation kits which are fitted to the roof, walls and floor for a fully insulated log cabin making it usable throughout the year.
Please also visit our Facebook page to see how easy it is to build a Hortons log cabin - www.facebook.com/HortonsLogCabins
What insulation do you need in your log cabin?
We offer various options with all of our insulated log cabins - suitable for everything from a garden games room (low level of insulation required) to garden offices (medium insulation values required). This is what we use for our own office in our showsite, with only a small amount of energy required to maintain a warm and comfortable working environment, even when sitting still for long periods of time.
Hortons can custom build our cabins to any size, shape or design - our 50mm cavity walled twinskin is warmer than a house built in the '90s and can be upgraded to a 110mm insulated cavity to be as warm as the new houses being built today (this is equivalent to a solid single skin log wall of over 700mm! (Yes, this is not a typo - that is over 2ft thick). So don't let other so called "log cabin experts" tell you that a 45mm single skin log cabin is so very warm - because it isn't!...They probably just say that because they don't offer any truly insulated cabins for sale that are much warmer.
Technical info to show the insulation performance for different insulated log cabin specifications
The table below shows the U values that are achieved with the various options for our Single Skin and Twin Skin insulated cabins (the lower the U value, the better) -
| Hortons Single Skin Log Cabins | ||||
| Cabin specifications | U value of building (W/m2K) | |||
| 28mm log cabin, no insulation | 2.56 | |||
| 45mm log cabin, no insulation | 2.28 | |||
| 28mm log cabin, with just roof insulation - no floor insulation | 1.78 | |||
| 45mm log cabin, with just roof insulation - no floor insulation | 1.48 | |||
| 45mm log cabin with roof and floor insulation | 0.84 | |||
| 70mm log cabin with roof and floor insulation | 0.81 | |||
| Hortons Twin Skin Log Cabins | ||||
| 35+35mm Twin Skin log cabin (120mm wall thickness) with standard fibreglass insulation kit | 0.60 | |||
| 35+35mm Twin Skin log cabin (120mm wall thickness) with standard Celotex insulation kit | 0.45 | |||
| 45+45mm Twin Skin log cabin (140mm wall thickness) with standard Celotex insulation kit | 0.35 | |||
| 45+45mm Twin Skin log cabin (200mm wall thickness) with UK Building Regulations Celotex insulation kit | 0.23 | |||
| 70+70mm Twin Skin log cabin (250mm wall thickness) with UK Building Regulations Celotex insulation kit | 0.22 | |||
For comparison purposes, this is a table showing the U values required by UK building regulations over the years, so you can see how the insulation of our cabins compare with houses built through the decades -
| 1965 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2016 | |
| Whole building U value (W/m2K) | 1.95 | 1.81 | 1.59 | 0.99 | 0.63 | 0.37 | 0.25 |
As you can see, Hortons Twin Skin cabins are far superior to any single skin cabin (contrary to what a lot of other cabin companies might say! It's all just typical sales talk - the tables above prove otherwise. And if asked to prove how good their cabins perform, it's a fair bet that either they would try to deflect from the question. Or more likely just look dumdfounded as most of them probably don't even know what U values actually are and what they mean!.
Insulated Twin Skin log cabin walls
A 70mm log wall has a U-Value of 1.41W/m2K . Some companies “boast” of getting theirs down to 0.69 W/m2K by using various retrofit adaptations, so not very good then! Consequently this would cost a lot to heat all the way through the winter. Even our thinnest 28+28mm Twin Skin is way better than that (not be confused with the overall building U values).
Some companies also say that it is not possible to get a cabin to meet current UK building Regulations requirements for a habitable house – how wrong that is. What they mean to say is that their cabins cannot meet UK building Regs! See the table above, where you can see that we easily meet this specification.
Insulated log cabin roof
The roof is the most important element of an insulated cabin, given that heat rises. Nearly all other companies just add a thin layer of polyisocyanurate (PIR) insulation on top of the existing cabin roof. This obviously greatly improves it's performance but we chose a totally different route with our insulated roofs. We use the complete depth of the structural roof purlins to house our insulation (our purlin depths vary from 140mm up to 200mm depending on the the spans involved) – you can see how superior this is method is. We achieve a U value of between 0.18 to 0.22, again far superior to commonly achieved U values by other cabin companies (usually around 0.65 W/m2K).
Insulated log cabin floor
Floors are the second most important part of a cabin to insulate – if you have a cold floor lhen obviously you get a cold room.
As with roofs, other cabin companies use thin insulation and achieve something like 0.8 W/m2K (and shout about how good it is!). Our standard Celotex insulated floor achieves a U value of 0.39 and our UK Building Regs floor achieves .21 W/m2K - somewhat better, you might say!
Log cabin thermally efficient windows and doors
We offer a range of options for our log cabin windows and doors, our "ISO house quality" having a U value of 1.1 W/m2K and we can even improve on this if need be by using triple glazing! Most other companies are lucky if they get under 2.0 W/m2K.
As you can see from the above facts and figures, other cabins that are touted as “insulated” are, more often than not, barely insulated. Hortons Twin Skin Log Cabins are designed for purpose and are highly insulated. Therefore if you want a truly all-year-round cabin that is really comfortable to be in even when there is snow on the ground outside AND won't cost you a fortune to heat, then there is only one option....
A Hortons Twin Skin Insulated Log Cabin!
