Probably the largest uninsulated surface on your home is the garage door, and when the weather chills the garage temperatures are not far behind. Here’s some tips on installing garage door insulation yourself.

How to Insulate Your Garage Door Yourself
By Virgil Hill

Howdy! If you’re looking for a new garage door, you’re looking at the wrong article.

My purpose with this article is to help people who are either moving into a new home or are looking to upgrade their existing home, with regards to comfort and energy efficiency. If you’ve got a home with an attached garage or lived in one in the past, you know how important it is to treat your garage as if it was simply any other room in your house. I mean really, if you’re going to use it for anything other than parking cars or storage, you need to have it heated and comfortable.

One of the ways to ensure that is to make sure you’re not losing costly electricity and money through that uninsulated garage door. The good news is that it costs a lot less and is a lot easier than you think to insulate an existing garage door as compared to going out and getting a new one.

Step one is to decide whether you want to buy a preconfigured kit from a kit manufacturer, and insulation company, or maybe even the people that made your own garage door. If you’d like to go this direction it will save you a lot of time and trouble, although it will cost you a little bit more. The first place to start looking is on the website of the company that manufactured your garage door. If they themselves make a garage door insulation upgrade kit, or work with the company that makes one for them, the information will be right there.

If your garage door manufacturer doesn’t offer a kit or partner with someone who does, there’s nothing wrong with buying an aftermarket kit yourself. A quick search on Google will turn up a long list of companies that will be more than happy to put one of these together for you. Be sure to check their websites for quality and trust factors such as the Better Business Bureau insignia, trust rank, and VeriSign insignias. These are an indication that you’re dealing with a quality company who has a reputation to protect. Also, make sure that their contact information is easy to find and includes a toll-free phone number. You may also want to check and see what kind of warranty, if any, is offered on the kit., and if there is a help line. Even the simplest projects can go awry, and there are always unforeseen events in any job.

If you’ve elected to go the route of buying your own materials, you’ll find that that’s not too difficult either. Just remember to follow the old carpenter’s adage: measure twice cut once. By buying your own materials you also have a lot more flexibility. You can choose the R. value, color and material type that you would most like to have.

But be sure not to forget the details when you take on this part of the project yourself. It’s not just about those foam panels to insulate your garage door — it’s also about the weather stripping on the sides of the doors and the compression bubble on the bottom. Be sure to check these and make sure they’re in good shape. If they are no need to spend the money. But if not, be sure to replace them in addition to installing your insulation or you will not see the savings in your energy bill you expected.

One final note — if after reading this, other articles on the Internet, and talking to the clerk at your local home supply store, you’re still a bit uncertain about moving ahead, I recommend that you pay a quick visit to YouTube. Simply do a search on “insulate garage door” and you will see a number of videos. Some have been placed there by individuals who simply want to help, and others are blatant promotional videos for insulation manufacturers. Either way it’s free information, and if a picture is worth 1000 words of video is worth 1 million.

Virgil Hill is a home repair technician and sometime writer living in Montana. He writes on garage door insulation and related home renovation topics for a number of web sites, including DIYgaragedoorinsulation.com

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