08 Feb 10 Your Garage Could Be Costing You Money

Have you got an integral garage? Is it thoroughly insulated? If your answers were “yes” and “no” respectively then your garage is quite likely costing you a fair amount of your hard earned money.

How so? Simple really; you’re paying good money to maintain a pleasant temperature in your house, by means of operating either air cooling and/or heating. But without adequate insulation throughout then really you’re also shelling out on chilling or warming outdoors, which commonly proves to be a costly proposition.

Unless insulation is applied comprehensively then thermal exchanges will always find the path of least resistance. For example, if you were to invest in cavity wall insulation but leave the single glazed windows in place then your wall insulation may as well not exist since heat will simply flow straight through the windows.

Similarly, fitting the latest in insulated windows will serve no purpose whatever if the walls aren’t also insulated as heat will just opt to leak through them instead, dragging your fuel budget along with them.

So where does the garage fit into this picture? Simple; an integral garage is what it sounds like – integrated into the overall structure of the property. Imagine for example if you had a living room the size of your garage which was poorly insulated – the effect on any connected rooms alongside or above would be quite noticeable. Well, that’s pretty much what an un-insulated garage can do.

The fact is, nobody would consider compromising the insulation of a room within the main home just because, say, it didn’t get used much. The effect would be felt elsewhere in the home, resulting in having to spend more money maintaining a comfortable temperature. Yet that is exactly how a great many folk treat their garage.

The techniques for insulating your garage are broadly similar to those applied to the other interior spaces in your house, with one notable exception, namely the garage doors. Today the majority of garage doors use a metal panel (usually steel). Like most metal objects, these are fantastic conductors of heat and thus absolutely terrible where insulation is concerned.

Yet there is an extremely simple and cost effective solution. You can either install doors that have already been insulated during their manufacture, or purchase one of the many DIY garage door insulation kits available. Installing insulated doors is the best (and most expensive) option but offers the best results and is invariably the only viable route with old wooden garage doors. Wood garage door panels are inherently better insulated than metal ones but still not really up to modern standards and they cannot take the extra bulk and weight of an insulation kit.

For much more information on this subject, check out these additional articles about quality wood garage doors and wood garage door insulation kits.

Tags: garage, garage door insulation, garage door insulation kits, garage doors, home, home improvements, House & Home, insulation, saving money, wood garage doors, wooden garage doors