How Your Garage Doors Can Help Reduce Your Energy Bills

Reducing energy bills is a high priority for many homeowners nowadays, and rightfully so. With our carbon footprints having a potentially devastating impact upon the environment, it pays to give energy usage ample consideration both in your home, and your garage. Part of this consideration includes changing to more energy-efficient home lighting, upgrading to energy-efficient windows and paying close attention to your thermostat settings.

Below are a few ways that your garage doors can help to reduce your energy bills and your carbon footprint:

Insulate your garage doors

Having your garage door insulated makes sense if your garage walls and ceiling are also insulated, and will help to significantly improve the overall energy efficiency of your garage. Alternatively, you could begin with insulating your garage door and progress to the rest of the space later.

If you’re replacing your existing garage doors due to their age and loss of functionality, it’s worth knowing that many modern doors come with polystyrene boards or polyurethane spray foam as their insulating materials, and are designed with better thermal breaks and seals than older doors. So, just by replacing your old garage doors, you could help improve your energy efficiency and lower your bills.

Some other benefits of insulated garage doors include:

• quieter operation
• reduction of noise transfer both inside and out
• makes the door stronger

Improve your doorframes weatherstripping

A small but effective step, weatherstripping your garage door can help improve the overall efficiency of your garage, and if you suspect that your garage doors could be causing you to lose valuable energy, talk to your local garage door expert about weatherproofing and insulation.

Upgrade your interior door

Think about the access door between your garage and your home, and ask yourself if it’s energy efficient enough. If it’s old, then the chances are that it isn’t, and you could benefit from an upgrade or replacement. If your access door is reasonably new, check the tightness of the seal, its weatherstripping and the threshold barrier on the bottom of the door.

Check the extra openings in your garage

Where your garage floor meets the wall, there may be gaps that not only allow hot and cold air into your garage, but also gives rodents and other pests instant and easy access. Use a foam sealant o caulking to seal any gaps that might be there, or consult with your garage door supplier and fitter if you need further advice before carrying out any work yourself.