Do you have an integral garage? Is it adequately insulated? In the event that your answers were “yes” and “no” respectively then your garage is quite likely costing you a fair amount of your hard earned cash.
So what’s the reason for this? Essentially, it works like so; you pay utility bills to ensure your home is kept at a comfortable ambient temperature (using air conditioning and heating as appropriate). However, if your home has any weak spots with respect to insulation then you end up wasting much of that money effectively heating/cooling the outside. A somewhat futile and expensive task.
If insulation isn’t 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.
By the same token, if you were to put in high efficiency double glazed windows but neglected to insulate the loft then again any kind of heat differences between the inside and outside of your house will search for the route of least resistance. This time the fuel bills will quite literally go through the roof.
But what has this got to do with your garage? Well, an integral garage is by design a part of your property and often furthermore the largest single inside space within it. If it isn’t insulated to a comparable standard as the remainder of the property then it gets to be an enormous thermal weakness along adjoining walls, ceilings and access points.
Seriously though. would you look at another room in your home and decide that because it’s used relatively infrequently you needn’t bother protecting it from the outside air? Of course you wouldn’t, since this so would have a knock-on effect on the other rooms and thus also end up costing more money. Yet quite often the integral garage is thought of as an outdoors space and thus left exposed.
Insulating a garage is very much the same as insulating the rest of the home, with one particular and very large difference: the garage doors themselves. Most modern garage doors comprise a large steel panel that possesses all the insulating characteristics of, well, steel. It’s a fact that steel is without doubt one of the most effective thermal conductors on the planet and therefore absolutely useless at keeping heat either in or out.
Yet there is an extremely simple and cost effective solution. You can either install doors that have already been insulated as part of their manufacture, or go for 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 wooden garage doors with windows and garage door insulation kits.