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does your garage door need replaced?

How old is the garage door on your home? Does your garage get very cold during the winter and very warm during the summer? If your garage door is quite old, it likely does not have the same insulating factors that are included in the manufacturing of the garage doors manufactured today. So, how do you know if your garage door needs to be replaced? Does the hardware need to be replaced if you replace the garage door? Go to my blog to find out all about the features included in the design of today's garage doors. Hopefully, you will find everything you need to determine if your garage door is in need of replacement.

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does your garage door need replaced?

Insulate Your Garage Door For Better Comfort Inside Your Home

by Eva Richards

Do you have an attached garage? If you want to make your home warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer, and quieter all year long, get your garage door insulated. It's a small detail, but it can actually reduce your energy bills and act as a sound barrier between you and the world outside. Here's what you should know.

Do You Really Need To Insulate The Door?

If your garage is attached to your house, the garage door is probably the biggest opening to your house - which means it's also the single biggest place for heat to seep in on hot days and warmth to leak out on cold days. Either way, you're paying for the extra energy it costs to keep your garage cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.

The quickest way to tell for certain if your garage door can use some insulation is to step through the house door that leads into the garage on a particularly cold or hot day. Is there a noticeable shift in temperature between the garage and the rest of your house? If so, you need to insulate your garage door.

Understand The Importance Of "R-Values" Before You Choose Your Insulation.

The R-value of a material tells you how resistant that particular substance is to heat flow. The higher the R-value, the better the insulation is going to work when it comes to climate control inside your garage. 

Typically, garage door insulations have R-values from 5 to 10. If you live in a temperate climate where the weather doesn't get particularly hot or cold, you can do fine with a lower R-value. However, if you live anywhere with an intense summer or a brutally cold winter, pick insulation with a higher R-value for your increased comfort.

Insulation with higher R-values also control sound better, so if you live on a noisy street, pick insulation with a higher R-value for better ambient noise control inside your home.

You Have Several Easy Choices When It Comes To Insulation.

There are a lot of types of insulation available, but the 3 easiest ones to apply to the inside of your garage doors are:

  1. Foam Board Insulation - Foam board comes in rigid panels that are typically made from polystyrene. They're easy to cut and usually have an R-value of 3.8 to 5 per inch of thickness (which means that you can increase the R-value simply by layering or buying thicker foam board.
  2. Batt Insulation - Batt insulation is the type of blue insulation that you commonly see rolled around pipes. It's highly flexible and has an R-value of 3.5 to 4 per inch of thickness. As a bonus, it's also designed to be fire retardant.
  3. Reflective Insulation - Reflective insulation is a type of foam board that's faced with foil. The foil acts as an additional moisture barrier, which can be very useful if you live in a rainy or generally humid climate. It also has a higher R-value, which can be as much as 7.7 per inch of thickness.

If you're reasonably handy, you can tackle the job as a DIY project, or you can hire a garage door company to handle the job for you. Either way, whether you've got a new garage door or an old one, it's a great way to increase the comfort level of your home and improve the climate control inside the garage itself.

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