‘Tis the season for colder temperatures. As your home’s heater kicks into high gear, there’s no time like the present to make sure your home is up to the challenge of providing adequate heat for your family without breaking the bank. When you’re considering ways to improve your home’s energy efficiency, don’t forget to include your garage on the list of rooms to improve.
Even though the garage isn’t a space most people spend an extended amount of time in, it can play an integral role in your home’s overall energy efficiency. The garage is often the most overlooked area of the house because it’s just not used as much. But, consider this — an average two-car garage measures approximately 480 square feet. This accounts for roughly 20 percent of the average American home. That’s a lot of space to overlook when you’re working to lower energy costs and improve your home’s efficiency.
Designing an energy-efficient garage is more than just purchasing an insulated door or limiting how much you put the door up and down. In some cases, purchasing an insulated garage door may not even make a significant difference in your garage’s energy consumption. Why? Energy efficiency is a measure of how hard your home’s systems have to work to maintain comfortable temperatures inside. So, energy efficiency encompasses anything that impacts how hard those systems have to work — including lighting and electric, building materials and even heating the garage itself. Having an insulated door but overlooking these other areas means you aren’t maximizing your garage’s potential.
Garage Door Insulation Tips
Before you start making plans and spending money, it’s important to do your homework.
When you think about energy efficiency in your garage, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the door. After all, a majority of homeowners rely on their garage door as their home’s primary entry and exit point. These days, a lot of garage doors see far more use than a home’s front door.
Insulating your current garage door — or replacing your old door with a new insulated one — can be a good first step when it comes to improving your garage’s overall energy efficiency. Insulated doors have an interior core built to slow the transfer of hot and cold air between the outdoors and the interior of your garage. If you’re wondering whether or not an insulated door will make a big difference, consider these benefits of insulated doors:
1. More Comfortable Indoor Temperatures
Your home’s garage acts as a buffer to outdoor temperatures by standing in between the outdoors and your indoor living space. Think of it as the vestibule you pass through when you head into a bank or your favorite restaurant. Like these entry points, your garage is designed to prevent outdoor temperatures from easily invading your home. With an insulated garage door, you can keep more unwanted air outside and maintain the temperature you want from your heater or air conditioner without interruption. This is because those outdoor temperatures have more layers to pass through.
An insulated door helps to maintain the indoor temperature of your home, and it also has a significant impact on the temperature of the garage itself. Why is this important? If you have a workspace, hobby shop or even a laundry station inside your garage, keeping the temperature bearable any time of year goes a long way in keeping the garage usable. Maintaining an even temperature inside of the garage also protects your vehicles, tools and anything else stored there. Equipment like hoses, power washers and lawn mowers — anything that has a liquid inside of it — can be damaged if left in frigid temperatures over time. Even your car battery will function better in a garage that is shielded from extreme winter temperatures.
2. Peace and Quiet
While it’s not technically a benefit related to energy efficiency, no one ever argued with peace and quiet. Insulated garage doors are heavier, and heavier garage doors aren’t as loud when they’re going up and down. When a garage door has a rigid inner core, it cannot move and rattle the way a standard door would.
3. Energy Efficiency at Its Best
Standard garage doors are typically manufactured with metal or include some metal component. Metal transfers heat and cold very effectively, but the problem is that you don’t want the temperature outside to be transferred inside. If it were, then your home would have to work harder to operate effectively — your home’s efficiency would be very low. With an insulated garage door, the metal elements are covered with foam or some other kind of insulation in its core, reducing the ability of the metal to conduct heat or cold into your garage and, ultimately, your home.
Ways to Insulate Your Garage
As we said earlier, an insulated garage door might not make a significant difference in making your home more energy efficient if your garage is losing energy in other ways. Here are some of our top tips for improving your garage door efficiency:
1. Solar Heating for Your Garage Door
An insulated garage door is a great first step toward maximizing the energy efficiency of your garage. However, it’s only an effective strategy if it’s done in tandem with other things. This is because insulation is designed to slow down the transfer of hot and cold temperatures — it’s not necessarily going to stop them all together.
If you spend a lot of time working on projects in your garage, then an insulated door alone isn’t going to cut it during the cold winter months. Sure, you could plug in a space heater nearby, but it’s not going to generate enough heat for all the space in your garage and it uses a lot of electricity, which means it’s not super energy efficient. You may want to consider heating with a solar heater, which produces infrared heat designed to reach every corner of your workspace.
How does it work? Infrared heaters use light in the infrared spectrum to generate heat. They don’t operate on any fuels, such as propane or natural gas, and they don’t take electricity. There are a variety of models on the market, but solar heaters basically operate by mounting a small solar panel on or near a window or a place that gets a lot of sunlight. It absorbs the light and then generates heat through the heating unit. Ultimately, the sunlight creates a generous amount of heat that can make your garage workspace comfortable even when snow is falling outside. And, since it is solar powered, it doesn’t contribute to increased energy costs within your home.
2. Weather Stripping for Garage Door and Windows
Sealing cracks and crevices around your door will keep your garage at a more even temperature, and the good news is that it’s not complicated or expensive to do this. By installing new weather stripping — or replacing it if it’s old and cracked — you can prevent air leaks and keep the temperature of your home more consistent. While it may seem daunting if you haven’t replaced weather stripping before, it’s actually a relatively simple procedure that doesn’t require a lot of time or effort. Companies that specialize in garage door installation and repair are a great place to start if you’re looking for weather stripping or other products to improve the energy efficiency of your garage door.
When you’re considering possible sources of air leaks in and around your garage, don’t forget to take a look at any windows in there too. Sealing off leaks in both windows and doors has been shown to save homeowners 10 to 15 percent in energy costs. There are many different products out there to tackle any window, including weather stripping — just as you’ve added to your garage door. You can also opt to use caulk to create a new seal between the frame of a window and the wall.
While you’re updating the weather stripping around your garage, consider adding weather stripping to the door between the garage and the interior of your house as well. It’s easy to overlook this entry point, but it can be a big source of trouble if it’s older and no longer has a strong seal all the way around.
To determine if it is functioning properly, check to see if the seal is:
- Present around the entire door
- Pliable
- Intact
The easiest way to identify gaps or breaks in the seal is to wait until nighttime and then turn on the light on one side of the door and turn off the lights on the other. Standing on the dark side, look at the door and take note of anywhere you see light peeking through. If light can get through, so can air.
Finally, check out the floor in your garage. While it may not seem like a big deal, air can sneak into the garage through cracks in the floor. If moisture gets inside of those cracks — even the small ones — it can freeze in the winter and then damage your floor, actually causing it to shift. When that happens, your garage door might not be able to open and close the way it should. That’s a hefty repair job itself, but consider this — if your garage can’t close properly, then it will be even harder to keep it the right temperature.
3. Lighting, Outlets and Switches
Lighting in any area of the home is something a lot of people take for granted. But light switches, outlets and fixtures can be a source of air leaking into and out of your home — and garage. Because holes have to be cut into walls and the ceiling to install your lighting and the necessary power sources, they can leave holes and minuscule openings throughout your indoor space.
These small openings add up. A gap that measures 1/8 of an inch around six ceiling boxes lets in as much air as if you just cut a 4-inch hole in the middle of your ceiling. You wouldn’t willingly cut a hole in your ceiling to let air in and out, so why wouldn’t you take steps to make sure your outlets aren’t letting unwanted air inside? In the case of your garage, having these gaps can also allow gasses like carbon monoxide — which are produced by vehicles coming and going in the garage — to be passed through those small cracks as well.
It may be difficult to identify specific leaks or spaces around lighting and outlets, so it’s a good idea to insulate all of the ones in your garage. All you’ll need is some spray foam, caulk and a steady hand. If you’ve got can lights in your garage that may be leaking, consider fixing the leak using an LED retrofit light/baffle kit.
4. Walls and Ceiling
You may not realize it, but your walls and ceiling can also contribute to a lack of energy efficiency in your garage. Adding insulation can increase your home’s ability to maintain a comfortable temperature year-round. Consider adding insulation to your garage’s ceiling as well as the walls to maximize its ability to keep unwanted temperatures out. After all, what’s the point in insulating the walls and then allowing all of the air to escape out of an uninsulated ceiling?
Depending on how your home was built, you can either have insulation blown into a small hole in the drywall and ceiling, or you can roll insulation between your joists. Always remember that when you select insulation, you should make sure that it has the right R-value, which is the scale that measures insulation’s ability to prevent heat or cold from traveling through it. The higher R-value particular insulation has, the better it does its job.
Insulation isn’t the only way to make improvements to the ceiling and walls of your garage. Sometimes, there can be gaps between the floor and drywall in the garage. To determine if this is the case, take a close look at the line where these two meet. If you see any gaps or feel any kind of airflow, then it’s time to take action. To fill in the gaps, use a silicone or latex-based caulk along the line where the walls and floor meet.
Looking For Garage Door Services In Central PA? Call Cornwell Door Service Today
With all the daily tasks you face, it can be difficult to think about maintaining your garage and improving its energy efficiency. But when you optimize the energy efficiency of your garage, you save money, and you keep your family comfortable all year long. By sealing cracks or adding weather stripping to your garage door, you ultimately lower your energy costs and improve your home’s ability to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Sometimes it just isn’t enough to add weather stripping or purchase a heater. Sometimes one of the best things you can do is purchase a new insulated garage door. If your current garage door just isn’t cutting it, let Cornwell Door Service help you find the right replacement. Located in Lebanon, Pa., and serving Camp Hill and Harrisburg, Cornwell Door has been operating since 1972. Our mission is to help you select the right garage door for your home or business. Offering free estimates and 24-hour emergency repair services, we pride ourselves on our high level of customer service.
Let us get your garage on track to energy efficiency. Contact us today or call us at 717-273-9841!