Make your garage more energy efficient
The importance of making your home a greener place is becoming increasingly clear to homeowners. There are all kinds of incentives from cities, counties and even states to be greener and more efficient, as well as specially designed appliances and home accessories that are more energy efficient than older models. One of the most overlooked spaces in our homes for becoming more energy efficient is the garage.
This is an issue especially for older homes and even newer built homes with builder grade garage doors. Many garages are uninsulated in a few of the walls and have a non-insulated door. So the heat or cool from your home gets sucked out through the garage, while the temperature control system in the house works extra hard to keep a consistent temperature. I’ve been in so many homes where you can feel a distinct draft of cold air coming from the garage. Because of the draftiness, the heat gets turned up, making the heating system in the homework overtime to keep the temperature consistent.
A huge part of becoming more efficient is
to make sure that your garage is sufficiently insulated. Many garages
do not have insulation in at least two of the walls! The wall of the
outside of the house, and the wall holding the garage doors. This
lack of insulation causes the hot and cold to fluctuate radically with
the weather. Because the garage is attached to the home, it causes the hot and cold in the home to follow.
You can call around and get new insulation installed for you, but it’s also a pretty easy DIY project. Your local hardware store should sell it by the roll! Call around to get the best price. Of course, you can’t add by the roll insulation to your garage door! But there are options to add Styrofoam insulation to some uninsulated steel doors. You will need to call your local garage door company to get an estimate on how much it will cost to get that done. Again, you can have some of our technicians install it for you, or you can easily do it yourself.
Add in insulation is not the best option though, the best option is to replace your insinuated door entirely with an insulated door. Hung Right Doors sells Clopay brand doors, whose insulated steel front and back doors start at an R value of 6.5! So obviously we recommend replacing your door, but you can bulk up your insulation in simpler ways before you’re ready to do that.
Other great ways to update your garage are by replacing your garage lightbulbs with LEDS- except for the lights in your opener those need to continue to be regular incandescent bulbs. Unfortuntately LED and floure