For optimum air quality, comfort and ideal temperatures inside your Georgia home, air sealing should be part of your energy efficiency plan. Here is a basic guide to weatherstripping.

What It Is

Weatherstripping (usually felt, adhesive-backed foam, plastic, vinyl or metal) fills in nooks and crannies around your home’s openings. Where window meets window frame, or door meets door jamb, you’ll find weatherstripping, including around garage doors, crawl space entryways and attic doors.

Why You Need It

If you have worked hard to clean and filter the air in your home, you must stop untreated air from leaking in, carrying with it spores and humidity. For allergy sufferers, keeping the indoor air clean is vital. Air sealing is also necessary for temperature control in both winter and summer.

What to Do

Inventory your home. Go door by door, window by window around your home and evaluate the condition (or even existence!) of your weatherstripping. Measure and record each window’s dimensions, so you can total the linear feet of material to buy. For doors, consider a bottom sweep and metal weatherstripping for the other three sides. Windows can have foam or plastic.

What to Buy

When at your local hardware store, pause to check out the variety of solutions for your needs. It’s perfectly okay to mix and match materials. Once installed, weatherstripping is nearly invisible in most applications. Buy around 5-10 percent more than you need, to allow for waste and inevitable mistakes.

When and How to Apply It

Wait until a dry, warm day to apply the weatherstripping. Clean the surfaces thoroughly. The job may seem large, but you can do a window at a time, when you have a spare half hour. Every window you complete will help save you energy and money. You should start at the back of your house, where you learn the skill on less-seen windows. Work your way around so the front windows and doors show your best efforts.

This guide to weatherstripping just scratches the surface. For more help for your Peachtree City area home, please contact us at Powers Heating & Air.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Peachtree City, Georgia and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). 

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