During more extreme temperatures, homeowners might enter their garages and feel like they’re freezing or sweating. Worse still, they might feel the effects inside their homes if they have attached garages, even if they already have heating and cooling systems in place. Extreme temperatures can also negatively affect your cars, like reducing their battery life.
If you’ve ever experienced this, fret not! There’s a simple way to protect your garage from cold air and warm temperatures—getting it insulated. Installing an insulated garage door is the best option for more insulation.
What is an Insulated Garage Door?
An insulated garage door helps keep your garage warm by preventing outside temperatures from affecting the inside of the garage, similar to how insulation protects your home from cold air. But how do they do this?
The secret lies in its structure. While uninsulated garage doors only have one panel, insulated doors have two, with insulating material like foam filling in the gaps between them. Additionally, some insulated garage doors have a hollow door frame, but the frame’s outfitted with insulating material.
Insulated vs Uninsulated Garage Doors
Uninsulated garage doors don’t do much outside of separating the inside of your garage from the outside world, keeping your valuables and vehicles safe and adding to the aesthetic of a house. Insulated garage doors, on the other hand, provide more benefits aside from keeping your garage warm and comfortable.
What are the Benefits of Having an Insulated Garage Door?
1. It saves you money on your energy bills.
One of the biggest benefits of having an insulated garage door involves how much you save on energy. While an uninsulated garage door will still protect your garage from the cold temperatures, it won’t be as effective as an insulated door. Furthermore, in attached garages, that cold air will likely seep into your home through the cracks in the door, especially when you go into your garage from inside your house. This immediately makes the connecting room and the room above it colder.
If you also heat your garage, then you will spend more energy (and money!) trying to warm it up without an insulated garage door. By installing an insulated door, you’re going to minimise heat loss, therefore also minimising the energy costs to warm up your home.
Moreover, there’s also the energy savings outside of winter and cold temperatures in general. Aside from keeping heat in during the colder months, it actually helps cool down your home during warmer temperatures by preventing more hot air from entering your garage. Therefore, an insulated garage door also saves you money on cooling costs for the rest of your home.
This works because insulation prevents the movement of heat, and it works both ways because heat tries to move from a hotter area to a colder one. So, it blocks warm air leaving your garage in the winter and prevents warm air from entering it in the summer.
2. It protects your belongings.
Many objects have an optimal temperature range. If they are stored in temperatures colder or hotter than this range, their composition and performance will likely take a hit. If the temperatures are too extreme for them to handle, they might break down. This includes your car.
There are a number of ways cold temperatures can affect your car:
- Your car’s body and tires get damaged due to corrosion and constant pressure changes, respectively.
- Your car battery gets harder to start as it grows colder, especially when it reaches subzero temperatures. Conversely, hotter temperatures also affect your car’s battery life.
- Your car’s fluids thicken up, making it more difficult for the car to function. Warming your car up and it getting cooled down again due to the cold temperatures can also lead to leaks and ice forming in crucial systems like brakes and engine transmissions.
- Your car’s wipers can freeze to the windshield.
- Lastly, if the car is exerting more effort into working properly, you’ll spend more money on fuel to fuel your car’s efforts.
Aside from your car, other objects in your garage will be affected by the cold too, especially fluids. By installing an insulated garage door, you can protect your precious belongings from damage from extreme temperatures.
3. It’s more durable.
The way insulated garage doors are built makes them more durable than uninsulated ones. The multiple panels of an insulated door make it sturdier and able to withstand hits from bikes, cars and basketballs. Insulated doors can also stand up to weather better than uninsulated doors too, especially uninsulated metal ones that may warp due to cold temperatures.
Aside from this added bulk being more reliable in protecting your valuables, it also helps keep home maintenance costs down because homeowners don’t need to repair dents and other damage. That’s also less cost toward maintaining the aesthetic and beauty of your home.
4. It’s quieter.
Garage doors will inevitably produce noise with age due to wear and tear, but that can be fixed with regular maintenance. When comparing brand new insulated and uninsulated garage doors, however, homeowners will soon find out that the former are overall quieter.
An insulated garage door’s insulation absorbs noise and vibrations. But aside from that, most are quieter than uninsulated doors due to their structure; there are less loose and lightweight parts that get jostled and produce noise.
R-Values and U-Factor
If you’ve ever looked up insulated garage doors, you might have seen the terms ‘R-Value’ or ‘U-Factor’ used to describe them. What do they mean?
R-Value
This value tells you how well an insulated garage door can prevent heat loss from a room, determined by its insulation’s thickness. A higher R-value means it’s more insulated. Tim from Garage Transformed recommends at least R-6 for attached garages, and at least R-13 for garages that are being actively heated or cooled.
U-Factor
This also tells you about an insulated garage door’s performance, but it’s not as widely used as the R-value. It measures how much heat flows through the entire door, as it takes into account the whole door structure, not just insulation. This scale goes from 0 to 1, and the lower the number, the better.
Garage Door Insulation and Kits
Let’s look at the different kinds of garage door insulation. The two most common types of insulation used in insulated doors are polystyrene and polyurethane. Here are their differences, according to Clopay.
Polystyrene
This is the more common type of insulation for garage doors. Rigid foam boards of polystyrene are sandwiched in between the steel layers of your garage door, or stuck to the inside of single-layered garage doors. With polystyrene panels, it’s possible to insulate garage doors that have already been installed.
While polystyrene does provide insulation and noise suppression, it’s not as effective as a garage door insulated with polyurethane. However, having a polystyrene insulated door is better than not having insulation at all.
Polyurethane
Polyurethane is more efficient than polystyrene. While the panel nature of polystyrene can cause it to miss gaps in between the steel layers of a multi-panel garage door, polyurethane doesn’t have this problem. Polyurethane foam expands to fill in the spaces in the garage door panels.
Homeowners should consider getting a polyurethane insulated garage door if they’re worried about keeping their garages and homes at the optimal temperatures due to extreme weather, or if they use their garage doors as the main entryway into their houses.
There are other materials that can be used to insulate garage doors, but they’re mostly used in insulation kits.
According to Timothy Dale of Bob Vila, the other possible garage door insulation materials are:
- Radiant Barriers – these provide insulation by blocking thermal heat (or radiant heat) as opposed to absorbing it. They’re made of reflective materials that can deflect the heat away from your garage.
- Fiberglass – it’s a very effective insulation material that’s also used to insulate houses. It absorbs heat and has a high R-value.
- Cellulose – this is the most expensive insulation material. It is organic, made from plant fibres, cotton, wood, or recycled paper products. They’re treated with borate to make them fire-resistant. It’s sprayed much like foam and is excellent at retaining heat.
Let the Experts Handle Your Insulated Garage Door Installation
Insulated garage doors provide many benefits not only for your garage but also for your home. After reading about their pros, maybe you want to get one for yourself. While you can insulate your own garage doors or install your own, it’ll take a lot of time and effort. So, leave it to the experts!
Whether you need to install a new insulated garage door or want to replace your old uninsulated one, SOS Garage Door Repairs has you covered. We install all kinds of garage doors, not just insulated ones. Get in touch with us; call 519-680-0257 to let us know how we can best help you!
