Weather Seals and Drafts: What Asheville Garage Doors Are Dealing With

By Asheville Garage Door Pros · Published October 13, 2026 · Updated October 28, 2026

Checking It Yourself

Start at the bottom seal. On a door installed any time between the late 1950s and the early 2000s - which covers most of the housing stock across the 23 areas we work in, from Oakley to Enka to Grove Park-Sunset - the bottom astragal is usually the first thing to go. Close the door at night and walk the inside edge with a flashlight off. If you see daylight or feel air moving along the bottom corners, the seal has flattened or cracked and is past flexing back into shape.

Check the side and top seals the same way, pressing a hand along the jamb where the door meets the frame. On homes from this era, the stop molding is often original lumber that has shrunk or warped slightly over the decades, leaving a gap even when the seal itself is fine. Look for a line of bent or missing weatherstripping - it should be one continuous piece and not stapled together in segments, which is a repair, not a fix.

One honest limit: this check won't tell you if cold air is coming through a cracked panel or a bowed section instead of the seals. If you've swapped the bottom seal and still feel a draft at floor level, the problem is more likely the slab or the panel than the weatherstripping.

How Local Conditions Play In

This area sits in a severe cold climate band, and a gap you'd shrug off somewhere milder turns into a real heat loss point here once temperatures drop for weeks at a stretch. Garage doors built for a median year of 1982 were not speced with today's sealing standards in mind, and across the service area's roughly 23,215 owner-occupied houses, a lot of those original seals have simply outlived their rubber.

The effect compounds in attached garages, which make up a large share of the 1980s-90s stock common across neighborhoods like Bent Creek, Oak Forest, and Haw Creek. A drafty garage door doesn't just chill the garage - it pulls heat out of any room sharing a wall with it, and in a severe cold climate that shows up as a cold wall or a cold floor well before anyone thinks to check the garage.

When to Call Someone

Call if the seal looks fine but you're still losing heat, since that usually means the track alignment has shifted enough that the door isn't seating evenly - a job that needs adjustment, not just new rubber. Call if the weatherstripping channel itself is cracked or rotted rather than just the seal insert, because on doors from the 1960s-80s that channel is sometimes original and brittle enough to crumble when you try to pull new seal through it.

Call as well if you've got a double door and the draft is worst in the middle - that's often a center gap from age-related sag rather than a seal problem, and pushing a thicker seal in there just masks it for a season.

The Problem

The core issue in this area isn't bad doors - it's old doors doing a 2020s job with 1980s sealing hardware, in a climate that doesn't forgive the gap. With median construction around 1982 and most of the surrounding areas built out between 1957 and 2001, a large share of garage doors here are sealing against conditions they were never matched to in the first place. Add a severe cold band and the small gaps that would be cosmetic in a milder region turn into a measurable draft and a cold spot in the house.

It's not a dramatic problem, which is part of why it gets ignored. Nobody calls about a garage door until a pipe freezes or a heating bill jumps, and by then the seal has usually been gone a while.

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