A hands-on program to help people reduce window drafts by building them insulated inserts is coming to Canterbury Town Hall – which is, it turns out, a most appropriate location.

“We convinced the town that our 200-year-old Town Hall could use it,” said Claudia Leidinger  of Canterbury, one of three co-sponsors of a program that will spend a week building insulating inserts through a program called WindowDressers. The town  hall windows are single-pane with no storm window and :some of them aren’t quite as true and square as they could be,” Leidinger said.

This means the inserts may not fit snugly but they still create dead-air spaces that greatly improve insulation. “Anything is better than what we’ve got!”

The program will spend the week of Nov. 7 through 13 assembling inserts of various sizes at the town hall for 200 windows in homes of people from throughout greater Concord who signed up in advance.  Volunteers for the build week are needed; check the Windowdressers.orgwebsite and click on Henniker or Canterbury on the “New Hampshire 2024 Community Builds” page to sign up for a 4-hour shift.

WindowDressers dates back to 2010 when the Universalist Church of Rockland, Maine, did an energy audit and found how much heat they were losing through leaky, aluminum-clad windows. They reduced the problem with wooden inserts for each window and it went so well the idea morphed into WindowDressers. 

In the past decade the group says volunteers have built almost 70,000 inserts in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.

The program gathers volunteers together to spend a few days building what are basically custom, interior-mounted storm windows. The program involves pre-measuring all the windows from interested parties, who paid between $36 and $87 apiece depending on size and materials. Financial aid is available as is help installing them. 

The frames are built at a factory in Maine and sent, along with insulating materials and jigs that align frames. Volunteers then gather together to build the inserts and prepare them for pickup.

That last step is slower than building inserts in a factory and shipping them to customers but is a vital part of the program as it helps spread the word about WindowDressers as well as help build community, something that’s hard to do in today’s world. 

“People like the process as much as the product,” is how Allison Pouliot, WindowDressers program manager for Vermont and western New Hampshire, described it in the Monitor in 2023. 

The organization often describes the builds as a small version of an Amish barn-raising. And just as a barn-raising includes food, Leidinger said food will be available during the WindowDressers build in Canterbury.

Other community builds are scheduled this early or early 2025 in New London, Peterborough, North Conway and Exeter.

Co-sponsors of the Canterbury build along with Leidinger are Ruth Heath of Canterbury and Sarah Keniston of Henniker. The project is sponsored By Canterbury Energy Committee, Loudon Lions Club, Henniker Lions Club, NH Lions Greens Team and Loudon Energy Committee.