Weather Seals and Drafts in Campbell Homes

By Campbell Garage Door Pros · Published October 18, 2026 · Updated October 18, 2026

What Changes With the Season

Campbell doesn't get the swings that wreck seals outright. The climate here sits in the mild temperate band, so you're not fighting hard freezes that crack vinyl overnight or the kind of summer heat that warps a steel panel. What you get instead is slow, steady wear - rubber bottom seals that dry out over years of sun exposure rather than splitting in a single cold snap. Most of the draft complaints we see aren't a seasonal event, they're a gradual gap that opens up as the door settles and nobody notices until a cold morning makes it obvious. If your door is original to a house built in the 1960s or 70s, which covers a lot of this area, that seal has likely been replaced once already, or it's overdue. The fix is usually simple and cheap, but it's easy to put off because nothing looks urgent until the draft under the door starts showing up as a line of dust or a cold patch on the garage floor.

How Local Conditions Play In

Campbell's housing mostly went up between 1947 and 1985, with a lot of it clustered in the 1960s and 70s - that's true across San Tomas, Cambrian, and the Golden Triangle area, and it's true a few miles out toward Saratoga and Los Gatos too. Doors and tracks from that era weren't built with the foam-core, dual-seal designs you see now. A lot of these garages still have the original wood jamb framing, which shifts slightly over decades and throws the door out of square just enough that the side seals stop meeting the track evenly. Because the climate here is mild rather than extreme, that gap doesn't get forced open by freeze-thaw cycling the way it would somewhere colder. Instead it just sits there, letting in drafts and the occasional fine dust that comes with it. We see this a lot in houses that haven't had the door touched since it was installed - the hardware still works, but the seal and the jamb around it have drifted apart by a quarter inch or more.

When to Get Help

Call if you feel a steady draft along the bottom or sides of the door even with it fully closed, or if you can see daylight at the corners. That's almost always a seal and alignment problem, not a structural one, and it's a short job. Call sooner if the draft comes with a door that's hard to lift or drags on one side - on a house from the 1960s or 70s stock common here, that combination often means the track has walked out of alignment along with the jamb, and a seal swap alone won't fix it. We won't sell you a full door replacement for a weather seal problem. If the panels and hardware are sound, which they often are even on a 60-year-old door, realigning the track and replacing the seal is the right job, not a new door.

The Problem

The core issue in Campbell is age, not weather. Median construction year here is 1964, and a door that old has usually had its hardware serviced at some point but not its seals, because seals don't fail loudly - they fail by a slow quarter inch at a time. Add in the mild climate, which doesn't apply the kind of seasonal stress that forces people to notice a bad seal the way a hard freeze would elsewhere, and you get houses that run with a drafty garage door for years without anyone addressing it. The honest limitation: if the jamb itself has shifted significantly, a new seal won't hold a tight line no matter how well it's installed, and that's a carpentry fix before it's a garage door fix. We'll tell you when that's the case instead of selling a seal that won't solve the draft.

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