Best Draught Seals Australia 2026:
5 Door and Window Picks, $15 to $33

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to amazon.com.au. If you buy through one of these links iFix may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't change which products we recommend. We focus on what actually lasts based on 16 years of repair-shop experience.

The hole in the wall you're paying to heat

Run a tape measure under your front door tonight. A 3mm gap under an 820mm door works out to about 25 square centimetres of open hole, roughly a 5cm square cut straight through to the weather, and most of the older doors I see are running double that. Nobody would drill a hole that size through a door and leave it there all July, but that's effectively what the gap is, and it sits at floor level where the cold air wants to come in anyway. Your heater doesn't know about the gap. It just runs longer to hold the room at temperature, and at the AU average tariff of roughly 33c/kWh a 2,400W heater working flat out is costing you about 79c an hour while a fair slice of the warm air it made slides out under the door. Multiply by three or four doors and a rank of leaky windows and the hole adds up to something closer to a missing pane of glass.

The fix costs between $15 and $33, which is why draught sealing keeps showing up first in every energy audit ever written. There's no other heating upgrade in the house where the hardware pays for itself inside a few weeks of winter, because every kilowatt hour the heater doesn't have to replace is money that never leaves your account. I went through the bigger picture in our smart home power savings guide, and sealing sat ahead of every gadget in it. This guide covers the five sealing products worth buying on Amazon AU right now, and because a lot of the Central Coast rents, I've flagged which ones go on and come off without costing you a bond. None of it needs a tradesman either: every product in this guide fits with scissors, a tape measure and at most a wipe of methylated spirits, so the whole job happens in one afternoon.

Where the air actually gets in

Doors first, and the bottom gap is nearly always the worst offender, because hinges drop and floors get re-levelled while the door stays the same size. After that it's the door perimeter, the vertical gaps between door and jamb that open up as timber shrinks, and then window sashes, which leak along every edge that moves. Older timber sliding windows are usually worse than the doors, and the sash that rattles on a windy night is telling you exactly where. In my experience a 1970s three-bedroom place has more gap area around its windows than under all of its doors combined, which is why two of the five picks below are tapes rather than door stoppers. Wall vents, exhaust fans and chimneys leak too, but they exist for ventilation reasons, so leave them alone and work on the gaps that were never meant to be there.

Finding the leaks costs nothing. Wait for a cold, windy night, kill the lights, and run the back of your hand slowly around door edges and window frames; the back of the hand feels moving air far better than the palm does. An incense stick does the same job visually, the smoke kicks sideways at every leak. For under-door gaps, have someone shine a torch along the far side while you watch from a dark room. Mark what you find with painter's tape and fix the rooms you actually heat first, because sealing the spare room nobody sits in is effort spent where the heater isn't. The whole survey takes twenty minutes, and it's the difference between buying what the house needs and buying what the ad showed you.

Wedges, sliders, tapes and flaps: what each one does

Under-door hardware splits into three types. A weighted wedge sits against the door bottom on one side and relies on mass to stay put; the good ones anchor to the frame so they don't wander, and they'll swallow big gaps that nothing else covers. A twin slider is two foam tubes in a fabric sleeve, one each side of the door, so it seals both faces of the gap and travels with the door instead of needing to be kicked back into place. The insert style is a twin slider with no adhesive anywhere, which matters more than it sounds once a rental inspection is involved. All three come off in seconds and leave nothing behind except, in some cases, a small hook-and-loop pad.

Perimeter gaps want tape. Closed-cell foam tape presses into the jamb rebate and compresses when the door or sash closes onto it, which suits small, even gaps and costs the least per metre. Silicone flap tape works differently: a flexible transparent flap bridges the gap and flexes shut, so it copes with the uneven, wandering gaps that foam can't fill, and it survives sun and repeated compression a lot longer than foam does. Match the product to the gap rather than buying one of everything. Measure first, because a 6mm foam strip in a 12mm gap seals nothing and a fat strip in a tight jamb stops the door latching. If you're not sure which you've got, close the door slowly onto a strip of paper at several points around the frame: where the paper slides out freely with the door shut, that's where the gap is, and how hard it grips elsewhere tells you roughly how thick the seal needs to be.

The renter rules: nothing that costs you your bond

The order of preference for a rental is simple: things that touch nothing, then things that grip with hook-and-loop, then adhesives, and you only move down the list when the gap forces you to. The insert-style stopper and the twin slider touch nothing but the door itself, so there's nothing for an agent to object to at the final inspection. The weighted wedge adds one adhesive-backed hook-and-loop pad on the frame. Test that somewhere hidden first, because paint that's older than the lease can lift with any adhesive, and photograph the door before you start so there's no argument later about marks that were already there. Keep the receipts and the packaging until you move out, too, because pulling a $24 seal off the door and taking it to the next place is exactly what these are designed for.

Tapes are the riskier end. Foam tape's adhesive is usually the polite kind, but on chalky or flaking paint even polite adhesive takes flakes with it, and silicone flap tape grips harder still. On aluminium window frames and glass, either tape peels off clean nine times out of ten and any residue wipes away with methylated spirits. On painted timber I'd test a short offcut for a week before committing metres of it. If a gap really needs tape and the paint really won't survive it, that's a conversation with the agent rather than a gamble; a landlord paying the heating bill on a leaky place has usually heard worse requests. Blu-tack style putty under a strip's edge is the old renter's trick for extra grip without adhesive, and it wipes off with the same effort it went on.

Seal the room, then mind the air in it

A sealed room holds heat, and it holds everything else too. Winter moisture from cooking, showers and drying clothes used to leak out through the same gaps as your warm air, and once those gaps close, the moisture stays and finds the coldest surface in the room, which is the glass. Condensation streaming down windows every morning, mould spots on frames and curtains, and damp creeping into a wardrobe on an external wall are the usual signs. The fix isn't undoing your sealing work, it's managing moisture on purpose: lids on pots, the exhaust fan running during and after showers, and clothes dried with airflow rather than in a closed room. Our dehumidifier guide covers the mechanical option for the rooms that stay damp anyway.

The other thing that builds up in a sealed room is CO2. A closed bedroom with two people in it climbs surprisingly fast overnight, and a CO2 monitor will show you exactly when a room needs airing, which beats guessing in both directions. Air the place hard for ten minutes a day, fully open windows, then seal it back up; that swaps the air without cooling the walls and furniture, so the room recovers quickly. One hard rule: an unflued gas heater needs ventilation to burn properly, full stop. Don't draught-proof a room where one runs. That heater is the exception to everything else in this article.

The heater side of the equation

Sealing changes what heater the room needs, which is where the real money is. A leaky lounge that only felt warm with 2,400W of fan heater running flat out will often hold temperature on a 1,000W setting once the gaps are shut, and at roughly 33c/kWh that's the difference between about 79c and 33c for every hour it runs. Over a two-month winter of evening heating, the arithmetic gets big enough that the $33 spent on tape looks silly against it. If the heater itself is due for replacement, our fan heater picks were chosen on thermostats and tip-over cutouts rather than raw wattage, and a sealed room is exactly where a thermostat starts earning its keep, cycling off instead of running continuously. The same logic applies to reverse-cycle air conditioning in summer, since cool air leaks out through the same gaps warm air does, so the seals keep paying past September.

While you're down at floor level with a torch, look at what the heater is plugged into. A 2,400W heater pulls the full 10A an Australian wall socket is rated for, so it goes straight into the wall, never into a powerboard and never through an undersized extension lead coiled behind the couch. We see the results on the bench every winter: melted powerboard sockets, browned plugs, cords stiff with heat. Check the plug with your hand after the first long run of the season; warm is normal, too hot to hold isn't, and a scorched or loose plug is worth a look at the workshop in Erina before it becomes a bigger problem than a draught ever was.

How I picked these five

Same gates as every guide in this series. Every pick is sold new, sits inside the $15 to $150 band the queue set for this category, and is stocked by Amazon AU directly or by an Australian storefront seller, because a $20 draught stopper posted from Shenzhen in August arrives after the winter it was meant to fix. Import-version listings and overseas export sellers got binned on sight. Ranks are real Amazon AU category sales ranks pulled the same day, not bestseller badges, and the lead pick sits at number 46 in Door Stops, which for a low-glamour category means a lot of people did this maths before you. The five picks land between $15 and $33, at the bottom of the band, because that's what honest draught proofing costs; nothing up near $150 earned a spot.

I also kept the list deliberately mixed: one weighted wedge for wrecked gaps, two twin sliders at different fits (one with zero adhesive for renters), one foam tape for even jamb gaps and one silicone flap tape for the uneven ones, because most houses need two of these, not five of the same thing. What didn't make it: unweighted door snakes, which drift out of position the third time the door opens, and the no-name brush strips whose listings state no dimensions at all, because you can't seal a gap you can't measure the product against. Prices below were right on the day and they'll drift, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a promise. And if your place has aluminium sliding doors, measure the track gap before ordering anything here, because sliders are their own problem and mostly want brush seals, which didn't clear the supply gate this round.

The 5 picks, $15 to $33

Prices are Amazon AU at time of writing (17 September 2026) and move week to week. Ranks are Amazon AU category sales ranks, checked the same day.

Side-by-side comparison

What we see fail at the bench: winter heating season

Draught seals themselves never come across the bench, there's nothing in them to fail. What arrives every winter is the gear working around the gaps: heaters strangled by hallway dust, powerboards that were never rated for the load, and electronics quietly corroding in rooms that got sealed without the moisture being managed. All three are avoidable, and two of them are avoidable for free.

Decision tree: which one should you actually buy?

• Renting, and the lease makes you nervous about marks? → The BKSAI insert at $24: zero adhesive anywhere in the box. The VISEMAN twin slider at $22 is the same idea if your door runs 35 to 36 inches.
• Big ragged gap under an old door? → The HNSMART weighted wedge at $26. It's the only pick rated for gaps up to 3 inches, and the kilo of glass beads keeps it where you put it.
• Whistling window sashes? → Foam tape at $15 if the gaps are small and even. Bell+Howell silicone flap tape at $33 if they wander, which on older timber windows they usually do.
• The door everyone uses fifty times a day? → The VISEMAN twin slider at $22. It travels with the door, seals both sides, and the sleeve goes in the washing machine when it gets grubby.
• Whole flat sorted for under $80? → Foam tape for the jambs ($15), the BKSAI or VISEMAN under the bedroom door ($22 to $24), and the weighted wedge on the front door ($26). About $65 all up, done in an afternoon.
• Heater smelling hot, cycling off early, or tripping the safety switch? → Unplug it. That's a clogged intake, a failing element or worse, and running it on the cutout is how small faults become fires. Bring it in to our Erina workshop and we'll tell you whether it's worth fixing before you spend anything.

Frequently asked questions

Do draught stoppers actually make a difference to heating bills?

Yes, and you can do the arithmetic yourself rather than trusting packaging percentages. A heater in a leaky room runs longer and hotter to hold the same temperature, and at roughly 33c/kWh a 2,400W heater costs about 79c per hour flat out. If sealing lets the room hold temperature with the heater cycling at half its duty, the difference over a winter of evening heating runs well past a hundred dollars, against $15 to $33 of hardware. The one situation where they do little is a room with big unsealed windows and no curtains, because glass loses heat faster than the door gap does. Seal the gaps and cover the glass at night, and the two fixes compound.

Will seal tape damage the paint when I take it off?

On glass and aluminium frames, rarely: it usually peels clean and any residue wipes off with methylated spirits. On painted timber it depends entirely on the paint, not the tape. Sound, well-bonded paint typically survives; old, chalky or flaking paint can lift with any adhesive product, including the polite ones. Test a short offcut somewhere hidden for a week before running metres of it, peel it back slowly at a low angle when removing, and warm the tape gently with a hairdryer first if it's been on for years. For rentals, the no-adhesive picks exist precisely so you don't have to have this gamble.

What's the difference between a door snake and a proper draught stopper?

Position keeping. A classic door snake is an unanchored fabric tube that relies on you placing it against the gap, and it stops sealing the moment the door moves or someone's foot clips it. The picks in this guide all solve that differently: the weighted wedge uses about a kilo of ballast plus a hook-and-loop anchor, and the twin sliders wrap both sides of the door so they travel with it. A snake on a door nobody opens works fine, which is why grandma's one on the spare room door lasted decades. On a door in daily use, it's decoration.

Can I still open windows that have foam tape fitted?

Yes. The tape sits in the frame rebate where the sash lands, so the window opens and closes normally and the foam compresses each time it shuts. What actually kills tape on an opening window is friction: if you've taped a surface the sash slides across rather than closes onto, it will peel or shred within weeks. Put it where the window presses, not where it rubs. Expect to replace foam tape on a frequently opened window every couple of years as the foam takes a set and stops springing back, which is also the argument for the silicone flap type on your most-used windows.

Is it safe to draught-proof a room with a gas heater?

Only if the heater is flued, meaning it exhausts outside. An unflued gas heater burns the air in the room and needs a constant supply of fresh air to burn cleanly, and the ventilation you're trying to eliminate is exactly what it depends on. Don't seal a room where one runs, and never run an unflued gas heater in a bedroom overnight, sealed or not. If you're draught-proofing a home with gas heating, check which type you have first, and treat the room with the unflued unit as the one room the sealing project skips. Electric heating has no such constraint, which is one quiet argument for it in a well-sealed room.

Where do I start if the whole house feels draughty?

Find the leaks before buying anything. On a cold windy night, turn the lights off and run the back of your hand around door edges and window frames, or use an incense stick and watch where the smoke kicks sideways. Mark every leak with painter's tape, then rank them: the rooms you heat in the evening come first, unused rooms last. Nine times out of ten the list ends up being the front door bottom, the main bedroom window and one internal hallway door, which the picks in this guide cover for under $70 total. A whole afternoon and one online order deals with most houses.

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