How to insulate your doors
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Insulating your internal and external doors is imperative to keeping your home free from unwanted draughts and chills any time of the year, but it’s particularly important during the colder months. Late summer or early autumn is an ideal time to take a look at the current effectiveness of the insulation of your doors and improve their efficiency.
Why is it important to insulate doors?
Insulation for your entire home is important, including windows, floors, walls and doors, as a means to keeping the home energy efficient! The most known insulation type will no doubt be roof insulation; as it’s well known that heat rises, we’re able to trap that heat by thoroughly insulating our lofts and roof spaces, keeping the warm air inside the house instead of it being lost through insufficient insulation of the roof. By maximising the ways we can improve our home insulation, we are acting on our own carbon footprint and ensuring our energy usage is much more efficient. In simple terms, it’s good for the environment and your wallet!
The process of insulating doors will add to keeping heating costs down by making rooms more energy efficient. Heat can be lost in all directions, and it’s often doors that get overlooked when it comes to ways to keep in that warmth. Typically the windows and doors of a home can account for 20% of heat loss. Not only does it make sense to insulate doors appropriately for energy efficient reasons, but it’s also good practice to ensure the health and safety aspect of your home. Sealing gaps under and around doors can effectively aid fire safety. Obviously, simply closing a door can help to keep a room warm, but how can we take that a step further?
Addressing the gaps
A common cause of heat loss in a room can be attributed to gaps in the door. This will be less likely to occur with a PVC style external door, but the gap between the door and doorframe can be a really common issue with internal doors. A reason that this happens can be due to a number of factors, including door shrinkage/warping, wrong size door for the frame, or the door hasn’t been installed properly. It’s often a visible issue – take a step back and look for gaps around the door, or feel with your hand for any draughts coming from the bottom of the door.
How can you fix gaps in the door?
There’s a few things you can do to address the gaps in your door, and not all of them are costly or require heavy duty maintenance tasks. Take into consideration the type of flooring that the door opens over – tile, carpet, wood – to determine the correct method. Of course, the solution lies in the size of the gap, but there are some ways to reduce the heat loss from a room via door gaps, including:
- Adhesive foam strips or draught stripping – This works by sealing around the edges of the doors to fill in the gaps. Simply measure the door, remove the self adhesive and line the edge of the doorway for a snug fit.
- Brush strips – Fix a brush strip draught excluder to the bottom of the door to eliminate any gaps in this area and seal it effectively.
- Portable draught excluders – A cost effective, simple solution to stop draughts getting in from underneath doors is to invest in a draught excluder! This can be moved when needed and can also provide a decorative element to the room.
External doors: Letterboxes & Keyholes
Considering external doors, be it a front door or a door leading out to the patio, there’s two potential ways that heat can be lost. Firstly, keyholes may be small but they can still be adding to a pesky draught! There are many keyhole draught excluders on the market that are easy to install; to stop draughts coming in through the keyhole, simply cover the keyhole with a keyhole cover which can be slid to the side to allow entry for the key. When it comes to letterboxes, it’s often obvious if that’s a main cause for a draught in a hallway or porch area as the letterbox may rattle as the air comes through it. Again, there are some excellent and easy to fit solutions to stop draughts coming in through the letterbox including purchasing and installing a specialised draught proofing letterbox. A letterbox with bristles or a flap should prevent air coming through the hole and there are many sleek options available.
Invest in brand new doors
Older doors tend to be a main culprit of the heat loss issue much more than newer doors, so a way to improve the energy efficiency in your home is to invest in brand new doors! Here at Arnold Laver we stock a wide range of expertly crafted internal doors and external doors for the home that include styles such as hardwood doors, bi-fold doors and white moulded doors. Take a look today to see which style would be best suited for your home and get in touch if you require further guidance.
Doors Essentials
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