By JAY ROMANO
New York Times
Published: August 20, 2008
IT’S easy to forget the garage doors — how they open, how they look, even how much heat they let out of the house.
That is a mistake. They are a crucial component of a home’s curb appeal and a potentially large source of heat loss, an important consideration now that the cost of fuel is rising.
A wood or fibreglass garage door is typically uninsulated. It can be replaced with an insulated steel door that may be better than the walls of the home itself at keeping the cold out.
The best insulated doors are steel with a polyurethane foam core and a thermal break between the front and the back of the door. A thermal break is a piece of nonconductive material sandwiched between the front and the back of the door, preventing a cold exterior face from making the interior face cold, too.
The weather-stripping around the door and between the door panels is extremely important.
How much money these improvements may save will depend on a number of factors: how effective the weather-stripping is; whether there is insulation between the garage and the house; even how leaky the garage door was in the first place. But over the years it is possible to save hundreds of dollars.
Opening and closing the garage door is not always as simple as it sounds. For a few hundred dollars, an automatic opener can be installed.
With all automatic door openers, pulleys can be disconnected so that the door can be opened manually. Some can be disconnected from the outside, but most require another means of access to the interior of the garage.
Tags: garage doors, heat loss, insulated
