Hold your horses
Heating your home efficiently is a top priority in winter, and never more so than now, when cost-of-living increases are biting into our weekly budgets. Before you consider a reverse mortgage, taking out a loan for double glazing, or purchasing a second heat pump, there are a number of low-cost DIY strategies you can use to raise the temperature in your home. Dealing with draughts is one of them.
Subtle but serious
Draughts are sneaky because they are often so subtle, we can easily fail to notice them. Yet each time we heat our homes, in fact even when the natural heat of the sun through the windows raises the temperature in a room, draughts work to reduce our warmth.
The reason for this is simple. Warm air is lighter than cold air, so it naturally rises, gathering in the upper level of a room (unless of course there’s no, or poor, insulation in our ceiling, in which case that lovely warm air cools against a cold ceiling, or disappears through gaps).
Nature loves to fill a gap
Nature loves to fill a gap (think about how weeds rush in to fill a well-weeded garden!), and to fill the gap left behind when our hot air (which we’ve paid for!) rises, cold air, given the chance, rushes in. In response, we turn up the heat, sending more of our precious dollars into the ether.
Hidden hiccups
Just where does all that cold air come from? After all, it’s not as though you’re leaving doors or windows open on a cold day. The answer is, it’s sneaking in through multiple small (and sometimes sizeable) gaps. These can be found around the edges of poorly sealed doors and windows, in cracks, gaps, and holes in floors and walls, and in spaces that open to the outside world (such as a louvre window, an air vent, the chimney of an open fire place, and even the chimney of an enclosed wood burner). And while each draught admitter may seem barely worth considering in terms of heat loss, when added together, they can contribute significantly to cooling your home and emptying your purse.
Draught detective
Blocking those heat stealing gaps isn’t rocket science, but you do have to identify where they are in order to deal to them. Sometimes, a cold-air source can actually be spotted with the naked eye or by ‘feel’. You may notice a blind, light shade, or shower curtain moving, even when a window is closed. Or feel a cool ‘trickle’ of air seeping in as you walk past an external door. Areas around a decommissioned fireplace may feel cooler than other parts of a room. Watch out for your pets’ habits, too (cats and dogs hate a draft, and often move away from one, even if it means leaving their cosy pet-bed).
To catch sneaky draughts around external doors, a great trick is to turn off the lights inside your home, and turn on the lights outside. View doors from the inside. If you can spot light where you wouldn’t expect to, that indicates places where cold air can also. Use a torch to check your window sealing in the same way. If you have the ability to do so safely, go into your ceiling cavity, and see if you can spot light coming through from the rooms below. Again, only if it’s safe to do so, pop your head under the floor of your home after dark, when inside lights are switched on. If you can spot light, it’s a sure sign cold air has a way of getting into your home.
Action stations!
Gaps are so easy to fill, you’ll wonder why you didn’t tackle them before. Home maintenance stores can equip you with self-adhesive foam-backed tape to fill draughty spots around doors and windows (but note these materials can deteriorate over time, so may need to be replaced on an annual basis). Weather-stops can be screwed on to the bottom of doors, and draft excluder ‘sausages’ can be placed along any gaps at the bottom of doors in frequent use.
You can purchase filler to stop gaps around non-opening windows, and floor and ceiling insulation you may feel confident to install yourself (or which a more able friend or relative is willing to undertake for you). When it comes to blocking draughts from the chimney of a fireplace no longer used, that’s doable too (once there is no heat left in it). However, never seal off the chimney at its upper end (this will only cause condensation contributing to dampness in your home, and possibly also encourage toxic substances to leach or drift into the house). Pushing scrunched up newspaper into the lower part of the chimney will also attract dampness. Instead, always block an open fireplace with a sheet of plastic taped across the front of the fireplace itself. This can be simply disguised with an item of furniture or a pretty dried arrangement or basket of dry cones.
While there are other DIY tricks to keeping your home warmer in winter, blocking draughts is one of the simplest and most do-able ways to go about it. So why not start today!