Five moneysaving hacks to draught-proof your home and reduce your heating bills without spending a fortune

Being cold in the winter is nobody’s idea of fun, but then neither is spending your entire month’s food budget on taking the edge off the chill either.

Given the rising cost of home heating and energy in general as we move further into 2022, the choice between keeping your fish tank from freezing versus keeping the bulk of your diet outside of the baked beans aisle is a very real one that many folk will face when the weather starts to cool off again.

If you’re not rolling in the kind of money that’s needed to add double glazing, a new roof, and wall insulation but your house is draughty enough that it’s kind of ruining your life and making you uncomfortably cold in winter and possibly even ill, you do have some options. There are several things you can do to draught-proof your home on the cheap, and that combined, can actually go quite a ways towards keeping your home warmer and/or cutting down on your energy usage over the winter too.

In this blog post I’ll share five moneysaving hacks to draught-proof your home on the cheap in time for winter 2022/2023.

How to draught-proof doors

Doors can be a real PITA when it comes to draughts, because sooner or later you have to open them and let all of the heat you fought hard to generate escape. While I don’t have a solution to the dilemma of how to avoid opening doors like, ever (without hermetically sealing yourself inside and eventually starving/suffocating as a result), I do have some tips on how to reduce draughts from doors when they’re closed.

• First up, you’ll only want to draught-proof doors to outside, or doors between rooms you heat and rooms you don’t. There’s no need to prevent the heat you want to keep from disseminating around the rooms you want to keep warm, after all!
• When it comes to doors going to outside, buy a cover for the keyhole; these can be bought for a couple of quid from Amazon, eBay, and all the other usual suspects.
• In the door that contains your letterbox, there are a couple of options, one being putting a box on the outside of the door and doing away with the internal one entirely and blocking it off.
• If you’re keen to keep the letterbox you do have and this happens to be in the door, you may want to change the flap part itself if it’s loose, doesn’t close tightly, or isn’t well insulated.
• Letterbox flaps with brushes around them help to prevent draughts, as can putting a box on the back of the door to catch the post/block out the cold, which also helps to keep things like your impending lottery cheque out of the dog’s mouth (should you have a dog) too.
• If there are gaps between the letterbox and the frame, fill them in with extreme prejudice, using things like spray foam or rubber strips.
• Also, for doors that you rarely use for actual ingress and egress, get a door sausage/snake thing for the bottom of it, to prevent draughts coming in that-a-way. These can also be used on internal doors between rooms that you heat and rooms you don’t heat.
• If you’ve got a door that’s in regular use but that’s a bit gappy at the bottom, you can buy rubber draught-excluder strips to fasten to the door too.
• Another approach to draught-proofing doors with glass panels in them is attaching made-to-measure perfect fit blinds to the panes, to insulate the glass/door itself.

How to draught-proof your loft hatch

If you’ve got an attic via which the wind whistles into the upper floors of the house and turns everything Baltic, you really should think first of all about insulating your loft, which yes, does sound like a big/costly undertaking, and compared to the other suggestions within this post yes, kind of is.

But unless your attic is damp or really awkward, it can usually be done DIY-style for about £400 and will save you about that same amount of cash on heating the home within the first year too.

If that’s not an option, you can tackle a direct draught from the attic space coming in via the loft hatch by using strip insulation around the sides of it, in the same way as you’d do for your external doors.

How to draught-proof windows

Depending on a number of variables, your windows might be responsible for up to 30% of the heat loss your home burns though in winter, and be the main source of its draughts too. Boo!

Replacing all of your windows for properly fitted double glazed offerings is probably outside of your budget if you’re reading a blog post with words like “moneysaving” in the title, but there are a number of things you can do to draught-proof your windows for rather less moola than a whole new set of windows will cost, and still dramatically improve things.

By the way, even double-glazed windows can allow draughts in too, so don’t automatically skip ahead if you’ve got modern windows.

• When it comes to gaps between the window and the frame on opening windows, pick up some cheap cushioned self-adhesive foam strips and stick them around the joins. This will almost certainly get you through a couple of winters (maybe more if you don’t open and close the windows much) but is generally considered to be a short-term fix.
• Using plastic, rubber, or metal strips for the same purpose is a little more costly but will also last for longer.
• If you have gaps around windows that don’t open, and around the frames themselves, use a silicone sealant that’s either clear or that matches the frame colour.
• Additionally, fitting thermally efficient blinds over draughty windows (and keeping them closed in cold weather) can make a massive difference to the comfort levels of a room and also your potential energy usage, and lower-cost thermally insulating blinds like roller blinds that are made-to-measure are relatively inexpensive and will soon pay for themselves.

How to draught-proof unused flues and chimneys

If you have an open fire or other great gaping hole to outside (and the fire itself isn’t used/isn’t part of the home’s essential ventilation) these can be a massive culprit in terms of letting heat out and draughts in.

You can literally just board over the fireplace or opening and will almost certainly find that this will make a big difference to how much cold gets in, but you can also get a proper chimney draught excluder too, which offers more effective insulation and also looks a bit less rough’n’ready.

Another additional or alternative option is to get a cap fitted over your chimney pot; but this needs to be done by a pro, and so is a bit more costly. It also means you’d need to hire them a second time to remove it if you do decide to put the fire/chimney back into use at any point.

How to draught-proof around pipes

Finally, pipework going from indoors to outdoors and/or from heated parts of the house to colder parts often have gaps round them that let the cold seep in, and this is another cheap and easy fix, or at least, it is when you’ve identified the gaps in question, which may be under the floor or in hard-to-reach areas.

Silicone beading works fine for smaller gaps, and for larger ones, expanding spray foam is the way to go. Simples!