Our Heating Bill Doubled and Every Window Tested Fine

The Smoke Test

We needed to see the air move.

I picked up a $12 pack of incense sticks at Target—the kind that come in a bundle of forty or fifty. You could also use a smoke pen from Home Depot (around $30), but incense works just as well and you probably already know where to find it.

The method is dead simple. Light the incense, let it smolder for a few seconds, then walk slowly through the room while holding it at arm’s length.

We started in the upstairs hallway, about six feet from the attic hatch.

Within thirty seconds, the thin trail of smoke began drifting toward the ceiling. Not randomly—toward the hatch. As I stepped closer, the smoke didn’t just drift. It bent, then streamed upward in a steady current, like someone had opened a vent overhead.

That column of smoke was our heating bill, visualized.

But seeing the leak wasn’t the same as fixing it. And a small gap around a hatch—could sealing that really make a hundred-dollar difference?

We were about to find out.