Posts Tagged ‘garage doors’
Do You Realise How Much Your Garage Might Be Costing You?
Have you got an integral garage? Is it properly insulated? In the event that your answers were “yes” and “no” respectively then your garage is quite likely costing you a fair amount of your hard earned money.
How so? Simple really; you’re paying good money to maintain a comfortable temperature in your home, by means of operating either air cooling and/or heating. But without adequate insulation throughout then really you’re also shelling out on chilling or warming outdoors, which commonly proves to be a costly proposition.
It should be obvious that if, for instance, the roof is well insulated but the windows are poor quality then heat will leak directly through the windows instead. The net result being that the roof insulation may as well not be there either. The key message is that insulation is an all or nothing measure; any gaps and the whole thing founders.
Likewise, well insulated and tight fitting windows and doors will be simply bypassed if the loft space or cavity walls have inadequate insulation. Temperature differences always find and exploit the weakest link, usually taking your money with them.
So back to the original point of this – the good old integral garage. Quite often a garage represents the largest single interior space in a house. Note the words “interior space” – that’s what an integral garage is. If it is poorly insulated then it acts as your home’s biggest thermal weak spot, set right alongside any surfaces (walls or ceilings) that are shared with other rooms.
The fact is, nobody would consider compromising the insulation of a room within the main home just because, say, it didn’t get used much. The effect would be felt elsewhere in the house, resulting in having to spend more money maintaining a comfortable temperature. Yet that is exactly how a great many folk treat their garage.
When you get down to the actual mechanics of how to insulate a garage then pretty much the same materials and methods as are common to ordinary home insulation are used. The principal difference being the doors. Now most garage door panels nowadays are made of steel (or other metals) that is among the worst insulators known; in fact it is an excellent conductor and heat will pass through as if it wasn’t even there.
Yet there is an extremely simple and cost effective solution. You can either install doors that have already been insulated as part of their manufacture, or go for one of the many DIY garage door insulation kits available. Installing insulated doors is the best (and most expensive) option but offers the best results and is invariably the only viable route with old wooden garage doors. Wood garage door panels are inherently better insulated than metal ones but still not really up to modern standards and they cannot take the extra bulk and weight of an insulation kit.
For much more information on this subject, check out these additional articles about the difference between a wood garage door and an insulated garage door.
Tags: Family, garage, garage door insulation, garage door insulation kits, garage doors, Home, home improvements, insulation, saving money, wood garage doors, wooden garage doors
