Weatherizing Your Home: Insulation By Greg Jordan    If your house is more than 20 years old you may want to consider weatherizing your home. The question then becomes, how can that be accomplished? There are a variety of things that can be done to help lower your monthly heating/cooling bill and they can range from some simple inexpensive solutions, such as new weather stripping for your doors, to more comprehensive decisions, like replacing your outdated single pane windows. In this article and additional future articles, we will discuss some of the options available for the do-it yourselfer and more comprehensive methods of making your home energy efficient.    When it is cold outside you want to keep that cold from penetrating into your house and at the same time keep the heat you produce, in the form of expensive energy, from leaking out. The opposite is true in our brutal Texas summers. It is important to realize that there are many ways that heat or cold enter your house and cold and heat escape. One of many culprits are leaky exterior doors. There is a simple way to determine if the weather stripping on your exterior doors is inadequate. As I am writing this article it is 85 degrees outside and I am running the air conditioner in my office. If I wanted to check if the door to my office was leaking air I could do one of two things: on the inside of the door I could run my fingers around the space where the door meets the door jamb, if I feel warm air coming in, then my door is not sealing correctly. If I do the same thing on the outside of the door, and felt cool air escaping this would also indicate inadequate weather stripping. The solution would be to replace the weather stripping. In some cases the door may not fit correctly, in which case the door or the door frame may need to be replaced.    This is only one solution to properly weatherizing your home. In future articles we will explore many additional options including single pane windows verses double pane windows, determining whether your wall and ceiling insulation is adequate, or if you are losing heat or air conditioning because of old dilapidated air ducts. Greg Jordan is the owner of Omountain Homes and has been building & remodeling homes since 1986. He does projects throughout central Texas. Omountain Homes can be reached by calling 557-4790 or you can visit them on the world wide web at www.OMountain.com. Close this window