Feeling A Cold Draft In Your Home? Here’s Where It’s Coming From!
Feeling A Cold Draft In Your Home? Here’s Where It’s Coming From! As a homeowner, is there anything worse than feeling a cold draft in your house? It’s annoying for a couple of reasons – the obvious one being that you feel chilly all the time. As a result, you feel inclined to turn the heating up high, which leaves you with staggeringly high energy bills. So, that’s pretty damn irritating as well!
Why do drafts happen? It’s usually down to a breach in your home that’s letting cold air in. Firstly, ensure that all the doors and windows in your home are tightly shut. If you still feel a draft, it means there’s a problem somewhere. More often than not, it will be down to one of these things:
Windows
Yes, even when your windows are closed, drafts can still come from them. For one, many windows have a little gap that you can open or close to let air in and out. In summer, you have these open to air out your home. If they’re still open when it’s cold, you’ll feel a draft – so close them.
Now, the only possible reasons for drafts from your windows are cracks around the edges or problems with the installation. If your windows have been installed incorrectly, there could be spaces between the panes and the rubber sealant, causing a draft. Here, you will need a window replacement to seal everything up and remove the draft.
If you see gaps around the outside of the window, you can fill them up with some sealant. If this doesn’t work, replacing the windows might be necessary for this instance as well.
Doors
Likewise, drafts can come from your doors. Mainly, this is when there’s a gap between the door and the doorframe. Look at any doors leading to the outside of your home and check for these gaps. They’re shockingly common – particularly in flats – but you can easily prevent drafts.
All you need to do is purchase draft excluders that fit around the door and plug up the gaps. They’re easy to get ahold of, and you can install them yourself without any help. Now, the gaps are plugged up and no air comes through them.
Electrical sockets
That’s right, drafts might be sneaking their way through electrical sockets. Wind and cold air from outside might find their way into your home through cracks and gaps around your electrical sockets. If this is the case, use a rubber sealant to fill the gaps around the sockets, plugging them up.
If that fails, you might need to reinstall your sockets, meaning they are fitted correctly and don’t have any gaps that keep reappearing around them.
The good news is that most drafts come from one of these three things, and it’s not hard to identify the cause. Furthermore, fixing these problems is straightforward in most cases, so it’s not going to demand massive investments. Even if you do have to spend money replacing or re-installing things, think about the cash you save on your energy bills without having cold drafts in your home.