At one point in your life, you’re likely to have lived in a home with a draught. You’ve experienced those unsettling noises that herald a breeze sneaking into your home, that makes your rooms feel even colder in winter or stifling in summer.
When looking to build a high-performance home, protecting your property against draughts is a key pillar of your home’s design. And it may not be for the reasons that you think.
Known more technically as uncontrolled ventilation, draughts are those gaps in your home where air steals in or leaks out.
You may not necessarily be able to see where a draught is, but you can feel it. It’s that tell-tale cold patch in your home during the winter months, or a warm breeze you can’t explain during summer.
There are many ways that your home can have a draught. For older properties, deterioration of building materials plays a big part. It could be cracks in your floorboards or skirting boards. It could be gaps in your insulation, or around door, window, or skylight frames.
Vents that lead directly outside, such as your bathroom exhaust, are often overlooked as causes of draughts.
While draughts do tend to hide, there are ways that you can spot where they’re coming from. You can tell that there are gaps around your window or door frames if you can see cracks or specks of light around them. You might be able to see a curtain moving in front of a window, or hear that unsettling whistling noise from a distant room when the wind gets stronger.
When designed the right way, your new build will be draught-proof, and you can continue to enjoy the benefits for years to come.
While draught-proofing your home helps to protect you and your property from the elements, there are some big benefits that go beyond the immediate.
Draught-proofing your home stops unwanted air from entering or leaving your property. This means that your heating and cooling system can work more efficiently. And when it works more efficiently, it means you need to use it less to keep your home warmer or cooler.
By using your air conditioning more efficiently it means that you’re using it less, which in turn means you’re reducing the amount of emissions that your property produces.
A home without draughts means that you can enjoy the same, stable temperature throughout. No rooms that are strangely cold, none that get hotter over summer, just the same even temperature wherever you choose to spend your day.
Draught-proofing your home also works to keep you healthier. Eliminating gaps around your windows means there’s less chance of moisture build-up, and less chance of mould starting to grow. It also means you can prevent dust, pollen, and other pollutants from getting into your home, making the air inside easier and safer to breathe.
Eliminating draughts from your home means you’ve shut off any gaps for bugs to get in. No more unwanted house guests like spiders, flies, cockroaches, or ants.
Draught-proofing helps to increase the value of your home. After all, if you had the option of a draughty home versus a draught-free one, which would you take? An air-tight, draught-free house tells potential buyers that they’ll enjoy living in a more comfortable environment, with the added bonus of saving on electricity, without explicitly stating so.
When building a high-quality, sustainable home, draught prevention is part and parcel of your design. But rather than simply preventing draughts, the goal is to eliminate them altogether, using methods that create an airtight home.
Your building’s draught prevention should start in the design stage, with the building envelope itself carefully planned to be airtight. Each building component will work together to stop uncontrolled air infiltration: insulation carefully aligned to avoid cracks or gaps, any frames permanently joined to walls to stop gaps, and any penetration of the envelope, like cabling or ducts, will be carefully planned to reduce the chance of unwanted gaps.
Good quality windows are sized and placed extremely carefully. They’re well-sealed and use a special mechanism to ensure an airtight seal when closed. Opting for double glazing adds a layer of inert gas in between the glass panels to help limit heat transfer, too.
Doors are another draught-prone area, so airtight construction around your door frame will help to stop any draughts entering from the sides.
In high-performance homes, similar to windows, you’ll be able to choose doors with air-tight seals. This helps to stop any air from entering or exiting your home when the door’s closed. Draught seals and sealing brushes at the bottom of the door can also help to reduce draughts.
While vents and fans perform a necessary task, they can be a big cause of draughts. However, with the right design, you can reduce how much air they let in and out.
Exhaust fans can be ducted outside, with non-return baffles installed to stop any air from coming back. As for vents, opt not to have them—you can rely on your windows and doors for ventilation instead.
And rather than an air conditioning unit installed on the wall, your high-performance home will use a mechanical ventilation system. This clever design utilises a fan that draws in fresh air from outside, pushes it gently around the home, expelling any stale air at the same time. A heat exchanger transfers the heat energy from the outgoing air to the incoming air, warming it to approximately the same temperature to ensure a consistently comfortable state.
If you’re considering building a new home, you need to take everything into account. Even draughts. And the best way to do this is to build a high-performance home.
At TrueLine Homes, we help you design and create properties that are designed to last. Buildings that utilise passive house properties to create more sustainable, more energy-efficient homes, and help you say goodbye to unwanted draughts.
Contact TrueLine Homes to book a design consultation and see how we’ll help you make this happen.