Draughty windows and doors: what to fix before winter in Birmingham and the Midlands

Nobody notices a draught in July. Then the first proper cold snap arrives, the curtains start moving on their own, and suddenly the heating is on an hour longer every evening. September is the sensible month to deal with it — the weather is still mild enough to have a door off its hinges for an afternoon, and you're fixing the problem before you've paid to heat the street for a whole winter. This is a plain-English guide from our windows and doors team for homeowners, tenants and landlords across Birmingham, Solihull and the wider Midlands.

First, find out where it's actually coming from

Most people fix the draught they can feel rather than the one that's costing them money. The two are often in different rooms. Pick a windy day — you'll find far more — shut all the internal doors, turn off any extractor fans, and go round the house methodically.

• Back of the hand. The cheapest detector you own. Run it slowly around the closed edge of each window and door, along the frame where it meets the wall, and around the letterbox and keyhole.
• A lit incense stick or a thin strip of tissue. Hold it a few centimetres from the joint and watch which way the smoke or paper pulls. It'll show you a gap your hand misses.
• Look for the tell-tales. Cobwebs in the corner of a frame, dust tracking along a sill, a curtain that lifts, or condensation forming in one corner of the glass but nowhere else.
• Check from outside too. Failed mastic between the frame and the brickwork is one of the biggest culprits and it's invisible from indoors.

The five things we find most often

1. Perished seals and gaskets

The black rubber gasket running round a uPVC window or door is the main weather seal, and it has a life. After fifteen to twenty years it goes hard, shrinks back at the corners and stops compressing. You can usually see it: press it with a fingernail and if it doesn't spring back, it's done. Replacement gasket is inexpensive and can normally be re-run into the existing groove without touching the glass or the frame.

2. Hinges and handles that have dropped

A uPVC window that needs a shove to lock, or a door you have to lift on the handle to get the key round, isn't stiff — it's out of alignment, and it's no longer compressing the seal along one edge. Most modern hinges have adjustment built in, and a friction stay or a worn multipoint lock can be swapped without replacing the window. This is one of the most satisfying jobs we do: half an hour, and a window that was whistling all last winter shuts properly again.

3. The front door threshold and letterbox

The gap under a front door is often the single biggest hole in a house. A brush strip or a proper threshold seal, a lined letterbox with two brush flaps, and an escutcheon over the keyhole will deal with most of it for very little money. On an older timber door, check the bottom rail for soft or spongy wood while you're down there — that's rot, and no amount of brush strip fixes it.

4. Failed mastic between frame and wall

The bead of silicone or mastic where the frame meets the brickwork is doing two jobs: keeping the wind out and keeping the rain out. When it cracks and pulls away — and after ten or fifteen Midlands winters it will — you get cold air in and, more seriously, water tracking down the inside of the reveal. If you've got a damp patch beside a window rather than under it, this is usually why. Raking out and re-sealing is straightforward; if the damp has been going a while, our damp-proofing team will want to look at the plaster behind it too.

5. Gaps that aren't the window at all

Before you spend money on glazing, check the boring stuff: the gap where the floorboards meet the skirting, an unused chimney with no cap, a loft hatch with no seal on it, and the hole in the wall where a boiler flue or an old extractor used to be. In a solid-wall Victorian terrace in Moseley or Kings Heath, these frequently add up to more cold air than every window in the house put together.

Misted double glazing — what it does and doesn't mean

Condensation between the two panes means the seal around the sealed unit has failed and moist air has got into the cavity. It isn't a draught and it won't make the room noticeably colder overnight, but the unit has lost most of its insulating value and it will only get worse and cloudier.

The important part: in almost every case you only need the glass unit replaced, not the whole window. The frame, hinges and locks stay. If somebody has quoted you for a full window because one pane has misted, get a second opinion — misted-unit replacement is a fraction of the cost and usually a single visit once the unit has been measured and made.

Doors that stick in autumn

Timber doors move with humidity, so a door that was fine in August can bind in October. Before you take a plane to it, work out where it's actually catching — close it slowly and watch the gap, or slide a piece of paper round the edge to find the tight spot.

• Catching at the top of the latch side: usually a dropped top hinge. Tighten the screws first; if they spin, the screw holes are worn and need plugging with glued dowel before re-screwing.
• Catching along the whole latch edge: the door has swollen. Easing it back is a last resort — a door planed in a wet October is a draughty door in a dry June.
• Rubbing on the floor: often the floor, not the door. New flooring or a thicker underlay is a common cause after a room refresh.
• Won't latch at all: the strike plate has moved relative to the latch. Moving the plate a couple of millimetres is a ten-minute job and fixes far more doors than people expect.

Repair or replace?

Our honest rule of thumb: if the frame is sound and square, repair it. Seals, gaskets, hinges, handles, multipoint locks and sealed units are all replaceable parts, and a twenty-year-old uPVC window with new gear can be perfectly weathertight. Replace when the frame itself has gone — cracked or distorted uPVC, rotten timber at the joints, or a unit so far out of square that nothing will pull it back.

Landlords, one to flag: draughts, cold and poorly fitting windows and doors fall under the housing health and safety rating system that councils use, and excess cold is one of the hazards they take most seriously. If you let property in Birmingham, Coventry or Wolverhampton, sorting draughts in September is a lot cheaper than answering an environmental health inspection in January. Our guide to who fixes what in a rental covers where the line sits.

How replacement glazing gets signed off

Worth knowing before anyone quotes you: replacing a whole window or external door in England is normally notifiable work under the Building Regulations, and the installation has to be either signed off by Building Control or self-certified by an installer registered with a competent person scheme such as FENSA. You should get a certificate afterwards — your conveyancer will ask for it when you sell.

Property Edge doesn't hold that registration in house. We survey, we do all the repair work, and notifiable window and door installations are completed alongside our certified install partner who self-certifies the works and issues the certificate. We'd rather say that plainly up front than have it come up at the end of the job.

A sensible order to do it in

• Walk the house on a windy day and write down every draught you find, room by room.
• Do the free and cheap wins first — strike plates, hinge screws, letterbox brushes, threshold strips, floorboard and skirting gaps.
• Renew any perished gaskets and re-mastic around the outside of the frames while the weather still allows it.
• Deal with misted units and failed locks next; these are parts, not new windows.
• Only then look at replacement, and only for the frames that have genuinely failed.
• Leave every trickle vent, air brick and extractor fan alone.

If you'd rather have someone go round the whole house in one visit and just fix it, that's a standard half-day for us. Book a windows and doors visit or get in touch with a couple of photos and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a £55 hour of adjustment or a window that's reached the end.