Are you tired of feeling that persistent chill in your home, even when the thermostat is cranked up? Those pesky drafts can be more than just a nuisance as you work to reduce drafts in home. Drafts can significantly impact your energy bills and overall comfort, making it essential to address them.
You might think fixing drafts is not a big deal, or maybe it’s something you’ve never dealt with before. It could even seem complex, so many just leave it be, but that can be an issue too, leading to higher energy costs and discomfort.
Table of Contents:
- Start to Identify Air Leaks
- Areas of Most Importance to Reduce Drafts in Home
- The Value of a Professional Home Evaluation
- What you can Expect Afterwards
- Conclusion
Start to Identify Air Leaks
The very first thing you want to do on this quest is locate where your issues are. Many times we feel these cold air movements, but finding their source is important.
The biggest air leaks in most homes are not always where you might expect. While you might notice drafts around your main floor windows and doors, the most significant culprits are often in the attic space and basement, where they can be hidden.
This phenomenon is known as the stack effect. Think of your home as a chimney, with the most amount of leaks often at the very top, which can be tough to discover but very important in creating lower heating bills.
Understanding the Stack Effect
Warm air naturally rises. It’s a basic principle of physics, and it plays a part in air infiltration into your home.
As the heated air in your home moves upward, it creates higher pressure in the upper areas, like your attic. This pressure forces warm air out through gaps and cracks, while simultaneously pulling in cold air through leaks in lower portions of your home, like the basement walls or around basement windows.
Prioritizing Your Air Sealing Efforts
Where should you begin to fight the drafts and create a more airtight home? Here’s a general roadmap you can think about.
Start with the most significant leaks, regardless of location, such as those around plumbing or electrical lines. These are areas where openings might have been cut larger than the wire or pipe installed through them.
Next, address smaller holes on the top floor ceiling or in the attic, including recessed lights, ceiling penetrations around fixtures, the attic hatch, and attic knee walls. Sealing these areas is crucial because warm air rises and escapes through these openings.
Areas of Most Importance to Reduce Drafts in Home
After addressing the largest issues, move down to address more areas, such as cracks on your walls. Sealing cracks helps to create a more consistent indoor air quality.
You can reach out and get help from experts to have the sealing job handled for you. This can be beneficial because there are areas, like mentioned above, that could be missed but are very impactful on your home’s energy efficiency.
Here is how we normally attack sealing these spaces and recommend owners as well. If not us, perhaps a contractor that can give a professional outcome.
| Floor: | Where to look and Reduce Drafts: |
| Top Floor / Attic: |
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| Bottom Floor / Basement: |
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| Main Floors: |
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Remember, various materials throughout your home’s building envelope can act as an air barrier. Even something as common as drywall, when properly sealed to adjoining materials, plays a significant role in reducing drafts and preventing heat loss.
Choosing the Right Materials
When selecting materials for sealing, be sure to use higher-end products to get long-term use. The right choice of products is crucial for lasting results.
Caulking is one item, among others, that should be highly considered for long term solution. You want a long-lasting, solid, permanent solution that prevents air leakage.
- Caulking: Perfect for sealing joints between building components and caulking windows.
- Weatherstripping: Ideal for blocking air leaks around doors and moving parts of windows; consider replacing weatherstripping if it’s old or damaged.
- Spray Foam Insulation: This versatile material not only insulates but also seals, significantly improving how your home regulates temperature. Using expandable spray foam can help in those tough-to-reach areas.
- Solid Building Components: Drywall, plaster, plywood, and glass can all function as an air sealing solution when properly installed.
- House Wrap and Polyethylene Sheeting: These typically act as air barriers and should be properly tuck taped to be effective.
- Door Sweeps: Install door sweeps on exterior doors to eliminate drafts coming from underneath.
- Window Film: Add this to your windows easy, as an extra layer.
Spray foam has come a long way in the past few decades. Many have older spray foam on various places throughout the home, and it can look like an awful job, because older versions were more of a solid that degraded quickly, making it an energy efficient upgrade.
The Value of a Professional Home Evaluation
To better find these areas of most importance for air reduction and preventing drafts, get help to locate all areas, big or small. A blower door test is another huge positive step to knowing for sure how airtight the home really is.
This test helps the technicians locate potential draft points you never would have found. It gives an air infiltration rating for your current setting and then post-sealing, so you know how your efforts improved your home’s energy efficiency.
What Happens During a Home Evaluation?
A professional advisor comes out to your place. Then, the technician starts locating all air penetration throughout, including openings you might have missed.
Next, the depressurization is done. They place air equipment, sort of like a large house fan, in an exterior door, and the results help by showing the air leakage rate.
The reading helps them figure out the infiltration level of your setup. This test tells the air changes per hour (ACH) that your place is experiencing.
What you can Expect Afterwards
From that professional-level testing done for you, your building science data is all there, laid out clearly in a plan. It should prioritize sealing that you can focus on to reduce drafts in the home.
From that Better Homes BC Source, we got a lot of the info here, but we can take the content and give better context on how the sealing actually improves it. The sealing does it by lowering how your air turns over, which is directly the drafts you might be feeling daily and making your house warmer overall.
More Resources Available for you.
Resources for draftproofing, like from Natural Resources Canada, are out there. They have a great publication called “Keeping the Heat In.”
Other resources are online for all kinds of things related to this, like adding a draft stopper. This will allow you to find what you like that will best fit your home’s style.
Conclusion
Addressing drafts in your home is a multi-faceted project. Reducing air infiltration will improve comfort and enhance your indoor air quality.
Starting with big air leak locations and strategically working through the smaller penetrations is a good approach to addressing these issues. Having testing completed, like from Kansas Spray Foam Insulation, is even a greater help with lowering ACH, making the space feel more comfortable.
Getting ahead of these issues will mean a reduction of energy expenses going forward and less cold air seeping in that you must heat in order to get consistent warmth. Starting to address the issues in order to reduce drafts in the home is going to greatly boost comfort with a more regulated and consistent environment, free from cold spots and cold floors.
