A drafty exterior door is not a minor inconvenience — it's your furnace fighting a leak it can never win. We replace worn weatherstripping, failed door sweeps, and perimeter seals across Ottawa and the Ottawa Valley, cutting drafts at the source and recovering the heat you're paying to keep inside.
There is no more expensive square inch in an Ottawa home than a gap around an exterior door in January. Warm air that took your furnace all evening to produce pours through that gap and disappears into the night, replaced by -20°C air that drops your entry temperature, creates cold spots throughout the connected rooms, and drives up your gas or electric bill in a way you feel but rarely trace back to the door. Ottawa winters run long and cold, and every exterior door your home has is a potential energy leak — especially if the weatherstripping hasn't been touched since the house was built. At Fix My Door Now Ottawa, weatherstripping and door seal repair is one of our highest-volume services between October and March, and for good reason. It is also one of the fastest-returning repairs in terms of comfort and operating cost.
What most homeowners don't realize is that weatherstripping has a service life. It isn't permanent. The foam, rubber, and pile seals around an exterior door compress over years of openings and closings, harden in the cold, crack with UV exposure, and lose their ability to spring back against the door frame. A seal that was doing its job five years ago may be doing almost nothing today — and you won't notice it going because the change is gradual. The first real sign is usually a cold November morning when you notice the entry hallway is ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house.
A properly sealed exterior door closes against a continuous cushion of flexible material on all four sides — top, both sides, and bottom. That cushion compresses slightly under the door's weight and pressure to form an airtight and reasonably water-resistant seal. It works because the flexible material springs back to its original position every time the door opens, maintaining contact with the door face through thousands of cycles. The failure modes are predictable: compression set (the seal flattens permanently and stops springing back), UV degradation (exposure to sunlight hardens and cracks the material), cold hardening (foam and rubber become stiff in extreme cold and lose their ability to conform), and physical damage from being caught in the door or abraded by a slab that drags.
Ottawa's climate accelerates all of these failure modes. The combination of extreme cold, direct sun on south-facing doors, and the physical stress of a door that sticks and is forced in winter is particularly hard on seals. A south-facing front door in Ottawa may receive weatherstripping that degrades in three to four years; a protected side or rear door may last eight. There is no universal schedule — the seal either works or it doesn't, and we can tell you immediately which is the case.
Perimeter weatherstripping runs along the door stop — the raised strip of wood or composite that the door face closes against on the top and both sides of the frame. It comes in several types depending on the door and frame, including compression foam, V-strip (tension seal), tubular rubber or vinyl, and pile for sliding surfaces. The right type depends on the gap between the door face and the stop, how the door closes, and the expected temperature range — not all weatherstripping materials perform equally at -25°C. We assess the existing installation, measure the gaps, and install the correct product for your specific door, frame, and exposure. The difference between a properly matched seal and a generic foam strip from a hardware store is significant in performance and in how long it lasts.
The bottom of an exterior door is typically the worst-performing seal on the whole assembly, and the most commonly neglected. A door sweep is the strip of material — rubber, vinyl, or bristle — that closes the gap between the door bottom and the threshold. Most standard sweeps are surface-mounted to the interior face of the door and drag across the threshold as the door opens and closes. Over time the flexible insert wears down, the sweep rises off the threshold, and a gap appears at the bottom that cold air moves through freely. The threshold itself also matters: a threshold that has settled, worn, or been damaged no longer provides a level surface for the sweep to seal against. We replace door sweeps with models appropriate for the gap size and door weight, and we adjust or replace thresholds where the mating surface has degraded. In some cases, an automatic door bottom — which rises while the door is moving and drops to seal when it closes — is the right solution for doors that have an uneven threshold or large gap.
Feeling a cold draft along the floor or around the door? Call 613-265-3667 for same-day weatherstripping and door seal service across Ottawa & the Valley — or request a free quote online.
Beyond the weatherstripping on the door itself, there is frequently a secondary air leak path that most homeowners never think about: the gap between the exterior door frame and the surrounding wall structure. As a house settles and the frame moves with moisture and temperature changes, gaps open up between the frame's exterior casing and the adjacent wall surface. Old caulk shrinks, cracks, and pulls away from the substrate. Those gaps allow cold air to migrate into the wall cavity and work its way into the house around the frame rather than through it — a path that weatherstripping alone can't stop. We inspect and re-caulk the exterior frame perimeter with an elastomeric product rated for Ottawa's temperature range, ensuring adhesion to both the frame and the wall surface. This step alone frequently makes a noticeable difference in the entry hall temperature. Where the gaps trace back to a shifted or rotted frame, our door frame repair service addresses the cause.
Patio and sliding doors present a different sealing challenge from standard hinged doors. A sliding door's perimeter seal is in constant motion — the pile or wiper seals along the panel's edges contact the frame on every operation, and they wear with every slide. The interlock seal between two panels in a sliding configuration also takes repeated compression and release. These seals need to be both flexible and durable, and when they fail the result is often dramatic: a patio door that sends a visible cold draft across the floor in winter, or a significant increase in heating loss through what is already the largest glass surface in the room. We replace sliding and patio door pile seals, wiper strips, and interlock seals as part of a complete patio door service, or as a standalone weatherization job when the rest of the door is in good order.
A draft that persists after fresh weatherstripping is installed is telling you something important: the door isn't closing tightly against the new seal. Fresh weatherstripping can only do its job if the door's face makes proper contact across its entire perimeter. If the door has dropped on its hinges, sagged in the frame, or the frame itself has shifted, there will be areas where the door contacts the seal and areas where it doesn't — and cold air will find those spots. We never simply replace the seal and leave if the door isn't closing properly. We assess the door's alignment, adjust the hinges, and if necessary true up the frame so the door closes flush and the new weatherstripping is actually in contact along its full length. This is the part of weatherstripping work that separates a real repair from a temporary fix.
The financial case for keeping door seals in good condition in Ottawa is not subtle. Natural Resources Canada consistently identifies doors and windows as one of the top sources of heat loss in Canadian homes, and exterior doors are a larger proportion of that than people realize because they're a moving seal rather than a fixed glazed unit. A door that is leaking cold air 24 hours a day for 150 days of Ottawa winter is costing you real money — and the repair to stop it typically pays for itself in one to two heating seasons. Beyond the operating cost, there is the comfort factor that heating bills don't capture: a cold entry hall, ice on the inside of a threshold, a door that feels cold to the touch even from across the room. Properly sealed doors change how the home feels as well as what it costs to heat.
The best approach to door sealing is proactive rather than reactive — checking and servicing the seals each fall before the cold arrives, rather than discovering a problem in February. We offer seasonal door weatherization visits where we inspect every exterior door, assess the weatherstripping and sweeps, re-caulk the exterior perimeter where needed, and adjust door alignment to ensure the seals are actually making contact. Catching a seal that's at the end of its life in October takes thirty minutes to replace. Discovering it in January when drafts are already streaming through takes the same amount of time but means you've already heated Ottawa's outdoors for weeks. If you'd like both locks and seals checked at once, ask about our combined security and weatherization assessment, which pairs with our lock repair service.
Drafts often have multiple causes, and weatherstripping connects to alignment, frame, and hardware work. These pages cover the adjacent issues:
Sealing a drafty door is one of the cheapest fixes there is. These guides walk through it:
A worn, leaking patio threshold on an Ottawa home — stripped out and replaced with a clean, level seal that finally closes the draft.
The old threshold had settled and the seal had flattened, letting cold air stream across the floor. We reset the threshold level and fitted new weatherstripping so the door closes tight and the draft is gone.
Sticking, drafty, or won't latch? The sooner we look, the simpler — and cheaper — the fix.
Same crew, same flat-rate pricing — explore our dedicated Ottawa door repair pages.
Cracked, split or rotted door frames repaired and reinforced — including exterior caulking so water and cold air can't bypass the weatherstripping.
Door Frame Repair →Drafty, leaking, worn or rotted thresholds and sills adjusted, resealed and rebuilt — closing the gap and stopping the cold under your door.
Threshold & Sill →Sliding and French patio doors that drag, derail, draft or won't lock — full service including pile seals, interlock strips, rollers and tracks.
Patio Door Repair →Tell us what's wrong and we'll get you a fast, honest price for the fix.
What Ottawa homeowners ask us most about door seals, drafts, and weatherstripping repair.
Call for same-day weatherstripping and door seal service across Ottawa & the Valley, or send a photo and we'll quote it for you — no pressure, no surprises.