Admittedly, your humble correspondent wasn’t there. But I’m thinking it was probably pretty easy for passengers on that Alaska Airlines flight to figure out where that draft was coming from. First there was a BOOM!, then there was a hole in the plane where a door had been and, if those clues weren’t enough, there must have been a continuous stream of airborne, pressurized, foil snack packs heading to the exit.
But when it comes to figuring out where that draft in YOUR house was coming from last week, when the temps dropped into the single digits, you weren’t so lucky. No booms, no holes, no floating packets of complimentary peanut-less salted snacks.
So it looks like you’re going to have to figure this out for yourself. Here’s some complimentary clues courtesy of Fix St Louis.
Entry Doors
Even though, unlike in an Alaska Airlines flight, there might not be any door-sized holes along the outside walls of your house, there may be a hole in the SHAPE of the GAPS around a door. If you put your hand all along that rectangular gap, you just might feel cold air coming in.
Fix St Louis can fix that by adding or replacing the weatherstripping on the top and sides, a “door sweep” that attaches to the bottom of the door, or even adjusting or replacing the threshold.
Windows
If you suspect there’s cold air coming in from your windows, that’s another job for Fix St Louis. Often, we’ll just need to caulk the gaps around your windows. But there’s also the possibility that the glass in your panes is not providing the insulation it once did.
There’s supposed to be trapped gas between the two panes of glass in your windows, but if the factory-created seal around the edges has broken and that gas has escaped, your windows won’t buffer the outside temperatures nearly as well. Fix St Louis can replace these glass panes with new sealed ones. So you won’t need new windows, just new glass, which is much less expensive.
Insulation
You know that pink stuff that’s either sitting on the floor of your attic, or maybe stapled to the ceiling above it? That’s insulation, designed to keep the warm or cold air inside your house from escaping, and to keep the outside air from affecting it. If you don’t have a thickness of 9” or more of that pink stuff, call Fix St Louis, and we will either roll or blow more in.
You know, over the years air travel has become a lot less glamorous. It seems like they keep eliminating amenities — like leg room, meals, and even peanuts. Who knows, maybe this was just a test to see if they can save money by eliminating doors. On the other hand, come to think of it, that might speed-up the off-boarding process.
But back down here on the Earth’s surface, you’re gonna want to hold onto your doors, and call Fix St Louis to keep them from doing stupid door things like — I dunno — maybe flying-off for no good reason.
Dr Steve