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If you’re the owner of an old set of exterior French doors which aren’t quite as energy-efficient as they ought to be, you have two options:
Glass is the main culprit when it comes to bad thermal efficiency in homes. Lots of doors have glazed panels. If the glass is broken, then it’s important to replace front door glass. Not only is this playing with your home’s energy efficiency, but it’s also a safety risk. Single glazing can be upgraded to more thermally efficient glass – and you don’t have to replace the whole door to do this. You can get designs that have buttons or fixings to attach to the door. Most soft cushion excluders are simply placed up against the door once it’s shut. In this case, the draught excluder won’t be in place when you’re out of the house, so the gap at the bottom of your front door is still a weak spot in your home’s thermal envelope, allowing heat to leak out and cold air to come in. For this reason, a soft pillow draught excluder is probably a better method for internal doors rather than your front door. This close up picture shows that the side light where it meets the floor and the wall is at 5.7°C. More like an outside temperature than the surface in a heated room. Kitchen French Doors Show Similar Characteristics To Lounge Finally, it’s worth considering the environmental cost of using all that extra energy. If your doors are leaking a lot of heat, you’ll end up using more heat trying to keep the inside of your house warm. For the most part, this energy will come from burning fossil fuels which contribute to man-made climate change. So How Is Energy Efficiency Measured?Rhoda Parry was the Editorial Director of Ideal Home and its sister titles, 25 Beautiful Homes and Style at Home from 2021-2022. She wass also Editorial Director for Gardeningetc, Amateur Gardening and Easy Gardens. Rhoda is a highly experienced editor and journalist and has worked on many women's lifestyle media brands throughout her career. For the last 20 years, she has specialised in homes, interiors and gardens. A storyteller at heart, Rhoda is passionate about championing, crafting and creating exciting written and visual content for digital, print and experiential audiences.
Energy efficiency is crucial to the modern home, and by extension the doors around it. There are several reasons for this. To start, building regulations demand that external doors can contain a certain amount of heat in your home. If your French doors open out onto a sufficiently robust conservatory, this might be less of a concern, but for most of us, it is. The most popular measure of energy efficiency in your home is the U-value. This describes how effective a material is as an insulator. The lower the value, the less heat is able to pass through a given area of material in a given amount of time. It’s typically measured in watts per metre squared. A standard double-glazed window will have a U-value of just under three.
The thermal images of the inward opening utility room door shown above, as well as our front door, had similar characteristics to the outward opening French doors in the lounge and kitchen. All these doors had different designs and used different materials so why would they have the same problem? I had just succeeded in expanding the problem rather than finding the solution. Armed with my new thermal imaging camera I start to photograph things that feel cold. I am not short of subjects. For variety I photograph the dogs. They were certainly warm, especially next to the radiator. After a brief doggy interlude I return to the serious issue of photographing the problematic French doors. French Door Thermal Image Meticulously crafted in the UK using durable materials, ensuring that this product will stand the test of time. To add to my misery when I visit my mum to take pictures of her 1970s Aluminium sliding patio doors I get temperatures similar to my state of the art triple glazed doors. Not a great argument to convince her to change the sliding doors to something more modern and warmer. The glass in our triple glazing does keep a better temperature but the door threshold temperatures looks worse. I abandon the argument and show mum some thermal images of the dogs instead. She seems to like these. It makes me feel better as well.
There are several avenues homeowners can explore to draught-proof their homes. Here's a breakdown of some effective methods: The best thing about this was that there was a simple way of remedying the problem; take up the slabs under the doors sills, seal properly and reinstate the paving slabs; far easier than removing doors and having to make good internal decoration. We have an ever-expanding range of products to meet all your draught proofing requirements, all of which improve energy efficiency and cut costs both domestically and commercially. There are a few different ways you can improve your French door insulation and draught-proofing: 1. Weather-stripping
It has been a battle worthy of the Napoleonic wars: a massive build up of weapons and intelligence, thrust and counter thrust, and some false dawns. Whilst my wife and I have yet to score a decisive victory over our draughty French doors, we are moving into the final stages of the fight and appear to have the upper hand. It seems to be a good time to document our struggles for the benefit of posterity. Names and certain details have been withheld to protect both the innocent and the guilty. The Battleground French Doors are a traditional and relatively affordable alternative to more modern styles of patio doors, like folding and sliding doors. Flanked by a pair of sidelites, they can create just as big a visual impact, but without the price-tag. Double Glazed French Doors Crafted using a hypoallergenic synthetic filling helps to maintain the cushion's loft and shape over time. Stormguard Rainwater Systems offers a fully comprehensive range of extruded, pressed and cast aluminium rainwater systems. Our product range is suitable for every type of domestic, commercial or industrial building, including bespoke requirements.
If you’ve exhausted all the above options and nothing seems to be fixing the draughts, it’s probably time to invest in a replacement door. Look for products that offer great thermal efficiency and come with weather seals. Draught excluders are placed at the bottom of your door, employing bristles to create a seal against the floor which halts draughts from entering through the gap beneath the door. 2. What are the benefits of draught excluders?
This pie chart breaks down the popularity of door snakes, brush-style, and foam-tape draught excluders, helping you choose the best fit for your home The first place to start seemed to be the MVHR air distribution boxes which the housebuilder had categorically stated did not need further insulation. I braved the loft with a screwdriver to take a look at the boxes. Fortunately the boxes have a maintenance panel, which was removed to reveal a pretty much empty box with some 25mm of soft foam covering much of the inside. The penny began to drop. The soft foam was sound insulation to reduce the potential for noise being transferred between rooms by the MVHR ducting, a known problem with these sorts of systems. It was helpful for acoustics but pretty useless for thermal insulation. The water heating energy requirements in SAP are actually calculated based on an assumed occupancy, which is itself calculated on floor area. SAP does that so the energy performance of different houses can be compared in a standard way. Based on our 101m² floor area, SAP thinks that our house has a theoretical 2.757 occupants rather than the actual 2. So the EPC water heating figure of 2,254 kWh is if anything overstated. Draught-proofing your home brings along a slew of benefits that go beyond just keeping the cold at bay. Here are some key advantages:
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