Draught Excluders

What a draught excluder actually saves

Air moves through a house because warm air rises and pulls cold air in behind it, and the gap under a door is one of the easiest routes it takes. You can feel it on the back of your ankles in a hallway on a cold night. A filled fabric tube laid along the foot of the door interrupts that path.

It is not insulation and it will not fix a badly fitting door. What it does is stop the constant low-level movement of cold air between rooms, which is what makes a heated room feel colder than the thermostat says. In the United States the same object is sold as a draft stopper, and it does the same job under the same physics.

Where to use one, and where not to

Internal doors are the obvious place, particularly between a heated room and an unheated hallway or a cold kitchen. They also work at the foot of a window in an older house with sash frames, and across the bottom of a loft hatch.

Do not use one against an external door that carries a trickle vent, or across an air brick, and do not block ventilation in a room with a gas appliance or an open fire. Those gaps are there deliberately. A draught excluder is for the gaps nobody designed.

Filled or cover only

A filled excluder arrives ready to use and is the straightforward choice. A cover-only version is the fabric sleeve on its own, which you fill yourself, and it exists for two reasons: it washes easily once emptied, and it costs less to buy several covers than several filled ones if you want to change them seasonally.

Where a range offers both, the product page states which you are buying. It is worth reading, because the two look identical in a photograph and only one of them will do anything when it arrives.

Length, and getting it right

Measure the width of the door, not the frame. A standard British internal door is around 76cm wide and most excluders are cut with that in mind, but older houses and anything bespoke will differ.

Slightly long is better than slightly short. An excluder that stops before the edge of the door leaves the exact gap it was bought to close, usually at the hinge side where the draught is strongest.

Care

A cover-only excluder empties and washes like any other cushion cover, at 40 degrees. A filled one usually does not go in a machine, because the filling clumps and never redistributes evenly afterwards, and the product page will say so.

For a filled excluder, spot clean and air it. Because it lives on the floor at the foot of a door it collects dust faster than anything else in the room, so a monthly pass with a vacuum upholstery attachment does most of the work.