This winter has been an especially stormy one on the west coast, with Storm Henry being just the latest to blight the nation with its blustery presence. This succession of storms may prompt many homeowners in Wales to wonder how they can best protect their property against this onslaught of wintry weather.

Wintry weather comes in many forms. It’s the acute shocks, such as when an uprooted tree is dramatically flung across a public highway, that grab the most headlines. But it’s the gradual, slow seepage of energy from houses across the country that represent the greater cost to homeowners. While it’s just the unfortunate few who have their homes flooded, we will all suffer from some form of energy inefficiency – and much of that inefficiency could easily be avoided. In this article, we’ll look at how.

Insulation

If you’ve got heat in your house, and you want to prevent it from escaping to outside your house, then the most logical means of doing so would be to place a barrier in the way. Walls and windows, in their most basic form, provide only meagre insulation – if you’re to make your home truly energy efficient, you’ll need to negate their heat-conducting properties by adding more layers of non-conductive material.

Where your windows are concerned, this material comes in the form of thin air – or, better yet, an inert gas like argon, xenon or krypton. This layer of gas is trapped beneath two parallel panes of gas, in a ubiquitous technology known as double-glazing. Barring a few listed properties, double-glazing is widespread in the United Kingdom, and helps to minimize the escape of heat through the window – which is the most vulnerable area of any home.

But double-glazing isn’t the only means through which you can prevent heat escaping through the window. If you’ve got a set of heavy curtains, then drawing them can make a marked difference in heat-retention.

You home’s walls, too, can benefit from the same principle. Many home’s walls consist not of just a single layer of brickwork, but of two separated by a gap known as the cavity. If this cavity is filled with insulating material, then its heat-retention can be substantially improved – you can get this done relatively cheaply using materials from Richard Williams, an excellent timber supplier in North Wales.

Draught exclusion

Closely related to insulation is draught exclusion. This is where, instead of heat energy radiating from your house into the outside world, the outside world is permitted to enter into your house via a gust of cold air, and thus dissipate heat from the outside.

There are myriad different ways in which a draught might find its way into your property – particularly if you’re the owner of an older property, which has had time to become a little bit more porous. Common points of entry are wooden doors and windows. This is because, in response to seasonal changes in temperature, wood has a habit of expanding and contracting. Once it’s done this enough times, sizeable holds might develop, through which draughts can enter.

So what’s to be done about this? Well, the first step is to locate the source of the draught. There are few different ways of doing this. One could simply walk around in search of a cold breeze – but this requires that the wind be blowing in the right direction at the precise time you’re in the room.

The traditional method sees a homeowner lighting a candle, and then moving around their home in the dark. When the flame starts moving, you know that there’s something moving it – and that something is likely a draught. A flame is far more sensitive to tiny change in wind direction that your senses ever could be.

Alternatively, you might consider an electronic draught-detector. These devices very precisely measure changes in temperature at a distance – they’re a lot like those thermal imagine cameras you might have seen in films and police-chase documentaries.

Simply point the device at the area where draughts might enter, and they’ll report the sharp drop in temperature which might indicate a draught with a bleeping noise. If you’ve got an enormous, draughty property to investigate, then investing in such a device might be more than worthwhile.

Once you’ve found your draught, the next step is to seal it. The way in which you’d do this will largely depend on the nature and location of the draught. If it’s in a window, then you might simply apply some sealant to the affected area – which you can obtain from a good builder’s merchant in North Wales. It it’s the bottom of a door, then you might decide to plug it with a draught-excluder.