Dodge the Draft!

But holes hidden in attics, basements, and crawlspaces are usually bigger problems.  

It is a fairly common building practice for a home to have a 6-square-foot hole in the attic where the chimney for the furnace/hot water heater penetrates the ceiling.  Ours did, and they just threw fiberglass insulation over it (worthless, as fiberglass does not stop air movement).  Sheet metal and an electric staple gun as well as some high-temperature sealant make quick work of covering up the hole, and building a stove pipe 'stand off' out of sheet metal to keep the insulation off the chimneys is pretty trivial.

Blown-in cellulose insulation is soooo much better than fiberglass batts -- it seals cracks and crevices to stop air movement, is made from recycled newspaper and is cheap (and non itchy!)  Our local big box hardware store rented us the blower for free (as long as we bought $100 worth of insulation from them) and they refunded the unused bales.  Did the whole thing in 2 or 3 hours with some help from my wife.

Crawling around a low-pitch roof with several cans of expanding foam to seal the attic was the hard part!

As a side benifit, the cellulouse made the house a lot quieter too -- acts as a big blanket for heat AND noise.

Commute Suck?  Twike it -- you'll like it!

www.uiuc.edu/goto/twike 

Drafts are caused when the pressure of air on the outside is greater than the pressure inside. This can be caused by many different factors.

If the home is heated by something that burns fuel and exhausts the product of combustion, it can lower the air pressure inside the building. The best fix for this is to install or improve the fresh air supply for the air burning furnace. When our old home was fitted with a 4 inch fresh air vent to our oil furnace, the cold spots in the home were reduced to the one big leak, and our fuel bill dropped dramatically as the furnace was burning better air. This did however, create a second problem. The air quality in the home dropped. We fitted a timer on the stove top exhaust and dliberately run it during the warm parts of the day. Fresh air was drawn in through the bathroom exhausts and we effectively changed the air in the house. With controlled ventilation, we were still ahead of the game.

Another example of "a little learning"or perhaps "a bad modification of a good design" or "a learner heating duct installer", showed up in a new home in British Columbia which had been built with a heating duct pumping hot air into the garage. With no return air to the home from the garage, (which even a first-day-on the-job building inspector would have noticed - and was a common practice in the 50's) the forced air system was doing a wonderful job of dropping the pressure in the home. When this heating system operated at the same time as a gas fired water boiler, the flue gases from the water heater stayed in the home instead of making it up its dedicated chimney, and the entire family was asphyxiated.

The simple daft is caused by blowing wind. If this is the cause, you really should be plugging things up from the outside, because if wind is getting in, rain/snow is also being blown into your walls and insulation.

Make friends with your community and share your knowledge. A team of individuals working on each others homes is less likely to miss the obvious. It introduces the element of friendly competition and can be very effective. Group shopping/ purchases of supplies is more efficient - someone always knows how to buy the cheapest widget, and someone -(like me)- will be very happy to tell you what you are doing wrong. You might just give away a few good ideas of your own, that you didn't know you had.