Draft Guards - stop that cold air infiltrating under your doors

Draft guards are a cheap and effective way of cutting down heat losses from your home. Drafts can account for as much as 30% of the heat lost from your home - that is a vast waste of both energy and money when added up over a winter, especially when some cheap and low tech solutions exist to cut the most common drafts right down.

Draft Guards - prevent those pesky drafts from sneaking under your doors.

At its simplest a draft excluder is a fabric barrier that blocks gaps under doors. Ill fitting doors and windows are some of the commonest sources of cold air infiltration into a building as they play up to natural air convection currents (cold air sinks so passes beneath doors). Traditional draft excluders are just cloth 'sausages' filled with relatively heavy wadding - these draft excluders are just placed in front of doors with gaps and do a good job of cutting drafts down. Unfortunately they are easy to dislodge, especially when a door is in regular use, and only need to be knocked a few inches out of place to loose their effectiveness. And if you have ever tried to keep one in place behind a door as you leave a room you'll understand the problem well!

An ingenious solution involves a double sided draft guard, with a 'sausage' on either side linked together beneath the door by a piece of fabric. The benefit of this arrangement is that the draft excluder moves freely with the door, without jamming underneath it, and is always effective.

Twin draft guards move freely with the door and are highly effective at preventing drafts infiltrating beneath doors.

DIY solutions

We improvised a quick but effective solution - a length of "large" tubi-grip bandage, such as the stuff people use on knees and ankles. Part fill it with balled newspaper and slide it along under the door from one end so that some of the paper is on each side. It isn't terribly pretty, but does stop drafts dead!

A commercial version is for sale here however you could probably do a pretty decent job making your own, or by getting someone with some sewing skills to do it for you! You could make your own in your own color scheme, or to suit unusual sized doors.

Whether you choose to buy or make your own these come in the list of 'must do' recommendations to keep your home warm this winter. They will end up saving you hard cash on your heating bills.

Drafty Windows

I was in the kitchen yesterday, enroute to the bathroom in my underwear and felt a VERY distinct cold draft - a few seconds waving my bare skin around and I found the source. We recently had the kitchen windows rehung, with draft excluding strips fitted and better catches to pull things tight. Apparently one got missed and was blasting freezing air right into the centre of the house. Without draft proofing strips I did the next best thing available and filled the crack with kitchen paper. Another quick and free solution but remarkably effective!

To check whether draft excluders are a good idea for your home you might try this simple test - go from room to room and shut the internal doors. Check the bottom of each one by wafting a little smoke nearby (eg from an extinguished match) - you are likely to find at least a few with a strong draft - if you do there is probably an air leak INTO the room from outside (look for this too). An excluder fitted to these doors, and then keeping the doors shut, will make an immediately noticeable difference to the warmth of your home.

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