Weather Seals and Drafts: What Redwood City Garage Doors Actually Deal With

By Redwood City Garage Door Pros · Published October 22, 2026 · Updated October 22, 2026

Checking It Yourself

Start at the bottom of the door. The rubber strip along the floor is the first seal to go, and on a door built anywhere near the median year for this area - 1966 - it's probably not the original strip anymore, which means whoever replaced it last may not have matched the track groove right. Run your hand along the bottom edge with the door closed. If you feel air movement or can see daylight at the corners, the seal has either shrunk, cracked, or pulled loose from the retainer.

Next check the sides and top. These vinyl strips, called astragal or jamb seals, sit in a track along the frame. On houses built through the 1960s and 70s - which covers most of what's out there across this service area - these tracks were often installed with a cheaper aluminum retainer that works loose over the decades as the garage door frame settles slightly.

Press a sheet of paper against the seal at a few points and close the door on it. If it slides out easily, the seal isn't making contact. Do this at the top corners and both sides, not just dead center - gaps are rarely even. A seal that looks fine from six feet away can still leave a quarter-inch gap at the corner where the draft actually gets in.

What It Costs

We don't post a flat number here because it genuinely depends on what we find once the door's open - seal material, length, whether the retainer track is bent or just old, and whether the door itself is original to the house or a later replacement. A straight bottom-seal swap on a standard door is a different job than replacing side and top seals on a door that's been painted over or has a warped track.

What we can tell you: if your garage door dates back anywhere near the 1966 median build year for this area, the retainer channel itself is often the real cost driver, not the seal material. Rubber and vinyl are cheap. Prying out a corroded aluminum retainer without cracking the door panel takes time, and that's where estimates spread out.

Honest limitation: if the bottom seal keeps failing every year or two no matter what we put in, that's usually telling you the slab has settled or the apron is uneven, and no seal fixes that. At that point you're looking at a concrete or framing fix, not a garage door one, and we'll say so rather than keep selling you seals.

What Is Going On

Garage doors from the 1947 to 1988 build window that covers most of this area were made with seal systems designed for a 15 to 20 year service life, not 60. Vinyl and rubber compounds from that era harden and shrink well before modern synthetic blends would. If your house falls into that window - and across the 41 named areas that make up this service territory, most do - you're likely dealing with at least the second or third seal generation on that door, sometimes retrofitted into a retainer track that was never meant for the replacement material.

The other piece is fit. Steel doors from the 1960s and 70s were built to looser tolerances than anything made today. A quarter-inch of play at the track was normal then. That's fine for the door itself, but it means the seal has to do more work closing that gap, and a generic strip bought off a shelf won't always compress evenly across an opening that's slightly out of square after fifty-plus years of use.

So the draft you're feeling usually isn't one failure - it's old material, a loose retainer, and a frame that's shifted slightly, all showing up as the same symptom.

How Local Conditions Play In

Redwood City sits in a mild temperate band, which matters more than people expect. In places with hard freeze-thaw cycles, seals fail fast because ice expands in the gaps and tears the rubber. That's not the mechanism here. What gets seals in this climate is slower: years of sun exposure drying out the vinyl until it hardens and loses its compression, plus decades of gradual flex from daily opening and closing.

That's actually good news in one sense - a seal here can outlast the same seal in a harsher climate by years. But it also means failure is quiet. There's no single storm that cracks it open; it just stops sealing a little more each year, so a lot of owners don't notice the draft until a cold snap makes it obvious.

Across the area - from Redwood Shores two miles northwest to the older tract streets further inland - the pattern holds the same way: the mild climate buys the materials more years, but it doesn't buy them forever, and a door that's 50-plus years old has had plenty of time to use that borrowed time up.

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