A whopping 25% of a home’s temperature loss is through fenestration products (windows and doors). This means your heating and cooling systems need to expend more energy to keep the home at the indicated temperature, making your utility bills more expensive than they need to be.
Door material type, poor installation, years of hard use, shifting foundations and seasonal warping due to changing humidity and temperature are responsible for a significant amount of your home’s energy loss.
So, to most efficiently regulate your home’s temperature and to keep your energy bills low, below are some things to consider when it comes to your doors.
Choose the Best Type of Door
Below are the best and worst types of exterior doors for energy efficiency.
The most energy-efficient type of exterior door is a fiberglass door.
Fiberglass is a poor conductor of heat and electricity. Due to this property, fiberglass doors offer up to almost four times the insulating R-value of the wooden doors. Fibreglass doors are highly weather-resistant, which means the rate of heat loss will be minimal. An added benefit of a higher R-value door is increased sound-proofing.
The least energy-efficient type of exterior door is unfortunately one of the most common: wood.
Wooden doors are terrible at insulating. They are the least energy efficient doors out of all common materials of doors because they absorb the heat and even cause heat flow.
Many people love the look of a wood door so opt for them anyway, but the wonderful thing is that you can get a fibreglass door that looks so much like wood, it's so hard to see the difference. Can you tell the door pictured above is not wood?
The worst culprit of heat loss, however, is a fully glass door. If you have an older sliding glass door that is not used in wintertime, it should be sealed with removable sealant or covered with heat-shrink film during the coldest months.
Weatherstripping
Making sure you have good quality weatherstripping installed correctly is so important for so many reasons, with energy efficiency being paramount.
The easiest and most effective weatherstripping for a door frame is a good quality V-shaped vinyl type. It makes contact with the edge of the door and provides a good seal even when the door warps from season to season. Combination metal and foam, or rubber weatherstripping that is screwed to the stop, needs to be adjusted regularly to conform to the changing warp of the door.
Not only is good-quality weatherstripping that is properly installed an eco-friendly solution to reducing your household energy consumption and costs by preventing cold drafts from coming in or cool air to escape in summer, it helps to reduce moisture from getting through, which can create mould and rot the surrounding wood in your walls and floor which can be an enormous cost to rectify.
Interested in weather-proofing your doorways? Contact Vancouver Door Doctor today. Call or text (778) 552-9643 or email us at vancouverdoordoctor@gmail.com. You can also learn more by following us on Instagram at @vancouverdoordoctor