Well, its been a few years since I posted in this thread. Since then I've continued sealing things here and there, but again this weekend I focused on sealing the house up further. I got an email from my energy auditor that I needed to have a follow up audit since its been a year since he came. So, in a little under a month I have the energy auditor coming back and I'd like to seal it up as much as I can before that.
I know my basement is pretty leaky, so I decided to try and seal it from the upstairs (at least for now). So, I started with the basement door. I noticed that when the furnace is on large amounts of air are being pulled through the door into the basement. So, first I mounted a door sweep on the bottom of the door.
I also noticed dust around the door jam area no doubt from air passing through that area. The area was quite tight though (less than 1/8") so I needed something very thin to seal the area. While picking out the door sweep I found some plastic sealing strip. Its V shaped and the door compresses when the door closes. I put this around the rest of the door. I checked once the furnace turned back on and it is sealed up pretty well now.
Next up was the kitchen windows. The auditor's had said that I had air leakage around window frames, not through the windows themselves. So, I took the trim off, trimmed the drywall back to see what was there. They did foam the window cavity, but for some reason I am still having leakage.
So, I decided to fill the rest of the cavity with foam. My guess is that the air leakage is coming through the wall from behind the drywall. Filling the cavity full of foam will seal this gap and take care of the problem. A serrated knife works great for trimming off any excess foam.
After doing the windows in the kitchen I moved onto the front door. I had worked on it in fall (some hinge problems), but leak tested it and noticed a lot of air leakage around the trim just like the windows. This is what I found. A good air filter up top, but absolutely nothing on the sides of the door. So, ripped out the fiberglass and filled it up with foam too.
