With the rising cost of living and a global warming crisis, everyone’s looking for ways to save money on their energy bills and lower their carbon footprint. Something as simple as draught-proofing your home can’t solve the world’s problems but it can make a huge difference to you personally.
Draught-proofing your home is one of the fastest ways to improve your home’s thermal efficiency. Here are some of the best ways to keep the warm air in your home and the cold air out of your home for longer.
Insulate All Your Doors
Doors are the main sources of draughts in the home and fitting draught-proof strips between the door and the frame is a quick DIY fix to save you energy. Brush strips can also be fitted to the bottom of your doors to prevent draughts.
Every door can be made draught proof including your garage door. In fact, proofing your external doors should be your main priority as most heat escapes from these. A quality insulated garage door can lower your yearly power consumption by up to 64%. As heat rises, ensuring that your lower ground level is draught-proof and insulated, will keep the entire home warmer for longer.
Draught-Proof Your Loft
Once you have the ground floor covered, it’s important to prevent heat escaping from the top. Insulated and draught-proof loft hatches are more than enough to prevent air leakage into the loft.
If your loft hatch rests on the frame, then you can simply put a foam strip around the perimeter of the bottom loft hatch. If the loft hatch is hinged, then you will need to put the foam strip on the top of the loft hatch and the inside of the hatch frame. You can also go one step further and have your loft walls insulated if you would like to maximise the warmth of your home.
Close Windows and Air Vents
It’s important to ensure air vents are closed in winter, going through the home, and ensuring that no vents are broken, and that heat can’t escape from your vents will keep your home warmer.
You may consider secondary or even triple glazing your windows to ensure there are no cold draughts coming in through the windows. Sash windows are regular culprits for letting heat escape and may need to be extra glazed. You can try to fix gaps individually if glazing is not an option.
Extra Tips
These are the three main ways to quickly draught proof your home. However, there are many ways to maximise your draught proofing from draught-proofing letterboxes, and keyholes to sealing your chimneys and floorboards. Draughts will often prevent themselves to you either as a physical breeze or an increasing need to switch your heating on.
Draught proofing isn’t the only way to keep the warmth in your home and adding extra thick curtains, thick rugs, and other warm home embellishments can also increase the energy efficiency of your home.
