Draught Dodging – a new workshop

Trying to improve the thermal quality of our homes is an on-going process – there’s always something more we can do to make things better; to make our homes just that bit more efficient.

On Saturday 14th January 2023, Insulate Sherborne hosted a workshop session at St. Paul’s Church and invited the local community to come along, share a cup of tea and learn about the kind of things we can do to make our homes warmer without having to invest much money in the process.

If you’d like to read a bit more about ways of improving energy efficiency in the home, take a look at ‘Energy Efficiency Advice‘ and ‘Draught Proofing‘ in our Advice and Resources section.

The focus of the workshop was learning how to make ‘sausage-dog’ draught excluders – those tubes that sit at the bottom of doors to keep draughts out of our rooms.

Here are a few examples of what makes a practical – and fun – draught excluder.

Sausage-dogs can be made from almost any soft fabric, including the sleeves of old woollen jumpers.

Buttons can produce an entirely different effect – maybe turn them into a galaxy of sausage-dog stars.
Originally a plain black velvet-type fabric.

Some ‘sausage-dogs can turn out to be snakes, with the simple inclusion of a couple of buttons and a fabric strip.
Originally, a pair of striped leggings.

Thanks are due – as always – to the volunteer makers who gave up their time for the afternoon to help our visitors to produce draught excluders for their homes. And with the information that they took from the workshop, we hope to hear of many more homes being visited by sausage-dogs in the coming weeks.

As well as draught excluders, we also had advice for visitors on how to line curtains with materials that you’re likely to have already in the home – long-used sheets and blankets, for example, that may be too worn for their original use, but can easily be hung behind curtains.

And we were fortunate to have Peter Bywater of Ridgewater Energy available to take queries on other insulation issues and what grant support exists to help those on low incomes. Pete usually arrives with free sample of things like low energy LED light bulbs, as you can see.