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Fair question. You can absolutely walk into Bunnings, grab a sausage (with onions - we aren’t heathens!) and buy a door seal for $10 or $20. If you have one small, even gap and you know exactly what you are trying to fix, that may be all you need.
But our $179 External Door Draught Proofing Kit is not one door seal. It is a complete system for sealing the whole door, and that is a very different job.
A door has four sides. A door snake deals with the bottom and a stick-on foam strip might deal with part of the top or one side. All useful products, but if air is getting in around the top, both sides and underneath, you have to deal with all four. That sounds simple enough until you look closely at an actual door.
Three Things People Usually Want to Know First
“Do I really need to spend $179?”
Possibly not. If you have one small, even gap and a $10 seal will fix it, buy the $10 seal. We sell inexpensive seals too. But if your door leaks around the top, sides and underneath, you are no longer fixing one little gap. You are draught proofing a whole door. That is what the $179 kit is for.
“Will the $179 draught proofing kit make my door hard to close?”
No, and this is a very big deal for us. We developed Draught Dodgers partly because we were fed up with seals that stopped the draught by making the door harder to shut. Draught Dodgers seal against the face of the door rather than being jammed into the gap, so they can follow an uneven door without putting resistance on it. The bottom seal is automatic, dropping down when the door closes and lifting again when the door opens.
“Am I going to be replacing this stuff again in a couple of years?”
An emphatic NO! Draught Dodgers are thoughtfully designed, architectural mouldings with a replaceable compressive seal, not a strip of sticky foam. Designed, manufacturing and shipped in Australia. They are intended to be fitted permanently, blend in with your door and stay put. The kit comes with a 10-year product warranty, fitting instructions, how-to videos and, if you do get stuck, someone at ecoMaster who actually knows how the product works and how to install it even in the most tricky of situations is only a phone call away.
Real Doors Are Rarely Straight or Have Even Gaps
The gap around a real door is almost never a beautiful, consistent 3mm all the way around. It might be tight near the latch, 5mm further up, 8mm at one end of the top, almost nothing at the other end and completely different again on the hinge side.
This is where stick-on foam can become frustrating. If it is thick enough to seal the larger gap, it can be too thick in the smaller gap and make the door really difficult to shut. If it is thin enough not to interfere with the door, it may not touch the larger gappy sections at all. So you can end up with the rather unsatisfactory combination of a door that is harder to close and still draughty.
We know this because we tried it ourselves. Years ago Maurice, ecoMaster co-founder and the bloke you see in our videos, carefully fitted ordinary foam to our front door. It worked beautifully and the draught disappeared.
Unfortunately, his mother-in-law, who was living with us, could no longer shut the door. Maurice could shut it, provided he gave it a decent pull. Nanna could not. That was not exactly the home improvement outcome we had been hoping for, and it became one of the triggers for developing Draught Dodgers.
Draught Dodgers Work Differently
Rather than stuffing something into the gap between the door and the frame, Draught Dodgers are fitted to the face of the frame. A flexible seal then meets the face of the closed door.
That means the moulding can follow the door as it actually is. Where the gap is smaller, it sits closer. Where the gap is larger, it can sit further away. This is why Draught Dodgers work so well on older and slightly wonky doors. The door does not need to be perfectly square and the gap does not need to be consistent.
Most importantly, the seal should not make the door difficult to use. Installed correctly, it simply meets the face of the door firmly enough to stop the air. We supply a fitting packer for exactly this reason, so you are not squashing the seal unnecessarily and turning every trip through the front door into a wrestling match.
The Bottom of the Door Needs a Different Solution
The gap underneath a door is usually larger, so our External Door Kit uses a Raven RP3 automatic drop seal.
When the door closes, the seal drops down to meet the floor or threshold. When the door opens, it lifts back up again. That means you get a proper seal without having a strip of rubber permanently dragging across the floor, catching, wearing out or making the door annoying to open.
So the $179 kit is doing quite a lot. It seals the top, both sides and the bottom, handles variable gaps, allows the door to keep operating normally and gives you a finished result rather than a collection of temporary patches. It also comes with proper installation instructions, a how-to video, a 10-year product warranty and real support if you need it.
But Surely I Can Just Keep Replacing the Cheap Stuff?
Of course you can, and sometimes that is completely sensible. Not every draught needs a complete door kit. But there is a familiar pattern with cheap adhesive strips. You clean the frame, stick the strip on, discover one section is too thick, move it, get the door closing properly, then six months later a corner starts peeling away. Eventually it collects dust, someone catches it, it comes off and you are left scraping black sticky adhesive from the frame before starting all over again. That does not mean every inexpensive seal is rubbish. It simply means a small consumable seal and a complete long-term draught-proofing system are not the same thing.
What You Are Really Paying For
You are not paying $179 because we have found a particularly expensive piece of compressive seal. You are paying for a system that came out of years of working on real Australian houses, where doors are crooked, gaps vary, frames move and the obvious cheap solution often does not quite do the job. You are also paying to fix the whole problem rather than one little part of it.
Once the door is properly sealed, the benefit is not limited to winter either. The same gaps that let cold air in can also let in hot summer air, pollen, bushfire smoke, dust and insects. The gap does not know what season it is.
So if you have one small, neat gap, buy the simple seal. There is no prize for spending more than you need to. But if your external door leaks around several sides, the gaps vary, you have already had a crack with sticky seals, or you simply want to fix the job properly and stop thinking about it, that is where the $179 kit makes sense.
Because the comparison is not really a $10 door seal versus a $179 door seal.
It is one small component versus a complete draught-proofed door.
And if you are not sure whether your door needs the whole kit, send us a photo before you buy. We would much rather help you choose the right thing than sell you something you do not need.
The goal, after all, is not to own an impressive collection of door seals; it is to shut the door and have the outside stay outside.
Go check out the External Door Draught Proofing Kit.
Not sure? Send us a photo and we’ll help you work it out.
One Last Thing Before You Go
I wrote the product description for this kit. I fussed over the photos, the wording, the little icons, what went where on the page and whether we had answered the questions people are likely to have before they hand over $179. Maurice has fussed over the technical details of all our products for years (actually decades). The rest of the ecoMaster team have had their hands on the product, manufactured it, packed it, answered questions about it, improved it and helped customers install it with phone support.
That probably tells you quite a lot about the sort of business you are buying from.
Maurice and I are not hiding behind an anonymous brand name and a beautifully polished paragraph written by someone who has never seen the product. We are happy for you to know who we are, where we are and how to find us. We stand alongside the things we sell because we have spent years developing, installing, testing and improving them, and because our name is attached to whether they work.
There is another part of this that matters to us too. When you buy from ecoMaster, you are supporting an Australian business, Australian jobs, local suppliers and manufacturers who make it possible for us to keep doing what we do. Wages get paid here, suppliers get orders here and tax gets paid here. It is not terribly glamorous, but it is part of what your $179 is doing.
So go and have a proper look at the External Door Draught Proofing Kit. I hope you can see the care that has gone into the product and into making sure you know exactly what you are buying and how it will benefit your home comfort for years to come.
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