Al Carrell: Air infiltration is a thief and it's stealing your energy dollars, but with caulking and weather stripping you can protect your home. Doesn't cost very much, doesn't take a lot of time and it really can save you some cold hard cash.
How do you find out whether or not you have air infiltration around doors and windows? One way is to take a hand held hairdryer, go outside and have somebody on the inside follow you around with a candle that's lit. If you have any air coming through there the candle's going to flicker.
But in an old house like this you don't have to worry about that. You can be sure there are lots of air infiltration places. Now this is going to be a weather stripping job and what we're going to do is start off with a place where this window comes down and closes and that's where a big gap is and what we're doing here is taking some peel and stick type weather stripping and we're just going to peel this off and then we're going to be able to stick this in place. Now, a lot of people consider this to be a temporary type of weather stripping, but it can be made a lot more permanent if you'll go in here and clean off the track before you put the stuff down and then also take some sandpaper and sand along where you're going to put this stuff. In the wintertime if you're going to be doing this, take your hairdryer and warm the surface and that means it's going to stick a lot better. This is going to give us a very positive seal because when it comes down and is against that no air is going to be able to get in.
Now, for in the track and up at the top of the window, you can use something like this. Because this is springy it'll fill the gap. Let's take a look at this door. It needs help too. As a matter of fact, we did the test on here and we found that air was coming in really bad right in this space right here. And so what we're going to do to take care of that, and that doesn't seem like much, but you'll be amazed at how much really good energy it's going to waste. So we're going to take this vinyl weather stripping and put it in place here and all you have to do to fix it in there is either use small nails or you can just use a stapler. Now this springy metal is another type of weather stripping and we found with our test that there were some places where it was allowing air to come in and all you need to do there is just gently bend out with a screwdriver and that's probably going to solve the problem. Now we also have some problems up at the top and we're going to use some more of the vinyl strip up here to be stapled in place and also along the inside over here.
That takes care of the door except for one problem. Down at the bottom we found that there is a big leak. Well, there's a piece for that too. It's called a door sweep. It's mounted on the inside of the door and when the door closes it can sweep across that floor because it's flexible down here and when it gets up to the threshold it gives you a real solid seal, so no air can come through anymore.
A little bit earlier we talked about caulking and what you want to do is to find any place where there are gaps around the doors and windows and just put a bead of caulk along there. Once you get through with the caulk you can come back over with your finger and smooth it out real good.
Episode 49 1997 - 98 Season
| Create Custom Wallpaper | Foam Insulation | Air Infiltration | Do-It-Yourself Sidewalk | Bad Credit |