New Zealand is moving closer to its goal of being completely energy green by 2025. The average Kiwi home owner knows that one of the biggest drains of energy in the home is when warm air escapes out of the doors or windows.
Does insulating your garage door help keep your electricity bills low and the warm air inside? Read on to find out the answer.
Thermal Boundaries
Finding out where the thermal boundary is in your home will help to understand the energy movement that is happening all the time. This when the thermal boundary demarcates where the cold, unconditioned exterior and the warm, conditioned interior intersect.
Insulating the garage door is only going to be of any use if the garage structure is connected to the house with a shared wall. The other concern for garage door insulation is when there is a finished room established overhead.
Does Insulation Work for Garage Doors?
It is usually good advice not to insulate your garage door. Sometimes it’s beneficial to make every building enclosure airtight, but garage doors are not well insulated, nor are they airtight. This is because their design does not lend itself to insulation. They are pretty bad components of an energy efficient building enclosure.
Garage door contact edges and panels are full of leaky parts. The installation of fibreglass or foam boards on the inside panel just chafes and fails after a medium period of time.
The way around this dilemma is to beef up the insulation on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the garage instead. These are far easier to insulate and make more of a difference then an attempt at spectacular airtight foaming or fibreglass would on the garage door.
Why Do Insulating the Other Parts of the Garage Make More of a Difference?
The garage ceiling and walls are often originally insulated in a haphazard fashion in most buildings. It is treated as an intermediate space, so the finishing and insulating are not given the same attention as the main body of your home.
If you have a living space over the garage structure, it will not be as well heated as the home interior. The walls between the garage and your home’s own heated interior are what should be seen as the structure’s thermal and air boundaries.
Check that the insulation for these areas are well installed, for example, the drywalls must be taped and intact.
When a garage is attached to your home, it is very often seen as a weak point in the general insulation of the house. It does not have to be this way, but insulating the garage door is not a complete solution.
Finish, insulate, and air seal the ceiling and the interior walls. These assemblies are the most important part of the home’s structural enclosure. Once that is done, the leaking of warm air in the main building into the cold space of the garage will be greatly reduced – and so will your electricity bills.
