While awareness of the value of insulation has certainly crept into the collective consciousness in recent years there’s still one component of the modern home where insulation is often ignored but shouldn’t be: the garage door. Some don’t believe the garage door would benefit from insulation, some have insulated the garage door on their to-do list but just never seem to get around to it, while still others just aren’t aware of how important insulated garage doors are. In this post, we’ll do our best to make the argument for insulating your overhead garage door.

Insulated Garage Doors: The Final (Insulation) Frontier

Think about it for a moment. The garage door is the single biggest opening on your Toronto,  or North York home. While little can be done to stop heat loss when the door is opened to let a car in or out, the fact is the door spends the vast majority of its life closed. Given that, here are 5 reasons why insulated garage doors are important.

1. Your House Will be Warmer: Because most people don’t heat their garage directly it’s the coldest part of the entire home. It also typically shares a wall with the kitchen or other part of the home’s living area and may also be directly underneath an upstairs bedroom. When the garage is ice cold because the garage door is not insulated it sucks heat out of these adjoining rooms which causes the whole house to be cooler.
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2. You’ll Save Money on Energy: Because the garage with the uninsulated door is typically 10 degrees or more colder than a garage with an insulated door all the adjoining areas of the home will be leeching heat into the garage. By insulating the door you reduce this leeching effect and keep more of your expensive heat in the house where it belongs thereby reducing the amount of energy you use.
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3. You’ll Have a Quieter Door: Some uninsulated garage doors are loud enough to wake the dead, or at least wake anyone sleeping in the house when they’re opened. In addition, a loud door lets anyone within earshot know exactly when someone has entered or left the house. If you’d like to sleep better and retain a certain level of privacy insulate your garage door. It will almost always run much quieter than it did before.
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4. You’ll Make Your Door Tougher: With an uninsulated hollow panel door, anytime one of the kids runs into the door on their bike or tosses a Frisbee that hits the door it leaves a ding. Adding a polystyrene insulated core will go a long way toward toughening up your door and making it, not only better able to survive incidental impacts but better able to withstand the constant stresses created by being opened and closed.
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5. You’ll Extend the Life of your Car: Constantly leaving a car in a sub-freezing garage isn’t doing it any favors. The kind of extreme cold we have in Toronto GTA can affect a car’s battery, thicken engine lubricants, reduce air pressure in the tires (which can shorten their life), and have adverse effects on spark plugs and wires. Insulated garage doors can raise the average temperature in your garage by 10 degrees and make the difference between your car needing frequent service and only needing scheduled maintenance.
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Yes, the benefits of insulated garage doors are many and significant. Don’t wait until your car won’t start on that cold January morning or the heating oil bill arrives and bowls you over. Insulate your garage door now and do your bank account and everyone in your house (including your car) a favor.