When the temperature starts rising in the summer or falling in the winter, you might have a hard time keeping your costs low. Pretty much everyone experiences a spike in home energy costs when the temperature spikes. In a sense, a lot of it is unavoidable. There’s no way for you to control how warm it gets outside. However, you can control how much heat gets in your house during the summer and how much heat escapes during the winter. The amount of heat transferred in and out of your house is called its R-value. You can determine the R-value of different surfaces by measuring how much heat they allow to transfer. What you will find is that you are losing much more heat than you think through the walls.
Most homes have walls insulated with fibreglass. This helps to absorb most of the heat that would move from the outside to the inside. The insulation traps the heat and prevents it from moving into the house or vice versa. A well-insulated home stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. However, wood does not insulate quite as well as insulation. So, everywhere that you have a stud, you are experiencing some form of heat loss.
Solutions to Heat Loss
One of the best ways to keep your home cool in the summer and warm in the winter is to make sure you limit the number of places where heat can escape. Your doors are actually larger contributors than you might think. Doors are pretty large parts of each wall, especially your external door. If the studs in the walls are contributing to heating costs, you know that the doors are going to be contributing as well. To slow down the rate of heat transfer, you need to pick a door that has a high R-value.
The heat insulating properties of the door depend on the material from which it’s made and the thickness. Certain composite doors from www.doorstore.co.uk actually insulate better than wood. Certain wooden doors, such as thick mahogany doors, are going to insulate better than other doors. Essentially, the denser the wood and the thicker it is, the better it will insulate.
Door Choices
You should choose a door based on the thickness of the wood and the type of wood. Or, you should pick a composite door which, depending on the materials, might actually insulate better than a wooden door.
In addition, you should think about whether or not you want windows. Windows will help you keep the room warm during the winter in a way, since light will be able to enter the room. Light can help warm a room, but glass windows have a pretty low R-value, meaning it will allow heat to escape during the winter. You have to account for that when you are deciding whether you want a window or not.
Picking a door can be more than just an aesthetic decision. Depending on your choice, you can raise or lower your own home energy costs.