How to Insulate Your Garage Doors and Save on Energy Costs!

hey guys due to the pandemic a lot of people want to spend more time in a garage and if you want to have a good time in there without freezing or sweating you need to insulate your garage doors and I'm going to show you how it's middle of May right now and summer is fast approaching what that means for most of us is we can look forward to higher electricity costs to cool down the home and for those of us who like to spend a lot of time in the garage it means a lot of uncomfortable sessions working in heat and as much as I love this garage and the setup that I have it has one big problem or two big problems which are these garage doors since I live in a townhome this garage is very well insulated otherwise but these two garage doors are a big problem because my house is west facing which means sunlight hits these garage doors directly for up to 10 hours a day and these garage doors are maroon colored which is dictated by the HOA so they're very dark not to mention there's these windows here that let sunlight in heating up the garage and in the hottest of the summer months I recorded temperatures up to a hundred and fifty degrees on these garage doors so today what we're gonna do is try our absolute best to insulate these doors as much as possible using a variety of different methods and because we want to quantitatively measure how effective our effort has been I bought this Bluetooth temperature sensor which records the temperature by the minute and I'm able to download the temperature swings in this garage and this has been running for about you know a week and a half to two weeks now so I've been able to record the temperature on days that are sunny cloudy hot or cool so after we're done here we will let this run for another week or so and we'll be able to tell exactly how effective all of this has been okay so before we do anything to the garage doors we're gonna go ahead and give them a good wash and let them dry since they accumulated a whole bunch of spiderwebs and lots of dust on them I'm obviously not trying to get them pristinely clean but I you want to give them a quick rinse and wipe and afterwards we're gonna start with the windows but if you don't have windows on your garage doors just skip a few minutes to the next section kela seems to be one of the most popular brands when it comes to window films so that's what I went with now there are a variety of choices even within this brand and I really just couldn't decide so I ended up buying two different types one is marketed as a means to enhance privacy as opposed to heat control but after doing a little bit of research I actually think both do a similar job in terms of heat rejection one just happens to be more reflective from the outside than the other I wanted to try both types mostly because this is something that I want to do for the windows inside of the house as well eventually and I wanted to know what they really looked like in person before spending hundreds of dollars in potentially ruining the looks of the house and Hema also sells the application kit which I do recommend even though it's a little bit expensive for what it is but it does make the job a lot easier than you would find it otherwise okay so I won't go into the details of how to do this mostly because hila already has an excellent DIY video for you I will just share a few thoughts and tips number one if you want professional absolutely flawless results just go ahead and hire professional you know most of this is actually easy enough but getting the corners perfectly right is really really difficult if this looks good enough to you then go ahead and do it yourself but if you're a perfectionist you will find yourself getting a little bit frustrated at times I didn't improve with each window though so if you have enough time and patience maybe you'll do a better job than I did and to buy more film than you think you need because you will mess up and waste film there's just too many different ways to mess it up like accidentally creasing it while you're taking the layers of parts or getting a dirty before you put it on the window you could cut it wrong you can ruin a corner and there's just so many different ways so definitely get more than you think you need number three make sure you get the adhesive type film not the static cling type static cling type is for basically people who know what they're doing and adhesive type is already hard enough to get it to stick perfectly into edges and corners so do yourself a favor and just get the adhesive type and lastly preparation is key clean your work area get yourself a nice big clean table instead of working on dirty boxes like I did and don't skip over razor blade in the windows and just wiping them clean as not enough as particles that are still stuck on the glass will show up noticeably after you put film over the window I was you know I was being a little bit lazy on the first window and it looked so bad that I had to redo the entire thing so this is what it looks like from the outside when you're done it's untreated on the left side to compare and you have privacy control mirror film on the right on the other garage door you have heat control titanium film on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side it's left untreated I was actually quite surprised by how similar these look you really won't notice that they're different films so unless you already know that and are looking for the differences and I know it's difficult to tell in the video but both films do a great job of maintaining privacy during the day compared to the untreated window and although privacy isn't the reason why I did this I guess this is a bonus feature for me it is worth mentioning that at night when the brightness of the garage inside is much higher than the outside these will not do anything to reflect light from the outside this obviously is not a surprise but just letting you guys know that well just in case all right now that we're done with the window films let's do something a little bit more substantial to insulate these garage doors this is made by a company called Sela foam and it can be found at Home Depot or other similar retailers the manufacturer states that it is a rigid foam the plastic with resilient closed cells with a permanent high r-value which by the way is used to measure in halation capability it's also water-resistant and has excellent physical strength and dimensional stability okay so from what I can tell it's basically styrofoam with a sheet of vinyl attached on one side although it does feel a bit stronger than the styrofoam that you would typically find in shipping boxes and this isn't that cheap it's about $65 for one kit which is good for one standard size garage door so I bought two of them for 130 dollars now an alternative to this is getting a fiberglass insulation kit from owens corning but it is more expensive and much more critically for me it doesn't do well with water you guys saw me spray down the garage earlier and that's actually something that I do quite often to flush out all of the dust that I make in here so I decided to go with a fancy styrofoam instead and save a little bit of money too now this actually ended up being a bit of a pain in the neck to install because I actually have a unusual garage door the standard garage door which is what this is pre-cut for is for narrower panels from top to bottom my garage doors are three wider panels top bottom so I have to cut this in shape to perfectly fit the panels and I used masking tape to cover the gaps in between which looked a little bit ugly despite my best efforts otherwise the insulation is really pretty straightforward just cut the pieces to shape if you need to and slide them into the door panels you might have to remove the crossbars so you can flex these things and but it wasn't that big of a deal to do one thing I didn't like about this stuff is that it makes an awful mess I mean you are working with styrofoam little bits and pieces of it go everywhere if you cut them so you might need to keep a vacuum handy to keep that under control otherwise pretty easy to work with and also these are really light so your rocks or motors won't have a problem lifting the additional weight you you all right so at this point we're done installing the window film and the sella foam on the garage doors it is now night time and check it out if the brightness inside of the garage is higher than the outside then the window film actually acts in Reverse and now it looks like I have four giant mirrors built into my garage doors which is kind of cool but it is really really unsettling because there could be some someone standing right outside peering in and I wouldn't be able to see that not that that happens around here but it is a very unsettling and kind of creepy feeling because again the window film is just providing privacy to the outside not inside and with the sella foam it was a little bit of a pain to install because of all the cutting and taping that I had to do and I try to make it look as neat as possible but ultimately that won't matter because we are not done yet and if you're new to my channel there's probably one thing that you should know about me which is that I like to overkill things I like to overdo things no matter what it is I'm doing and I'm sure that the sella foam and window film by themselves will do a decent job of cooling down this garage but we are not done the last thing that we're going to do is install reflective insulation material made by reflex sticks or reflectix on pretty much the entire garage door so what what that will do is get rid of this reverse privacy thing that I have going on now at nights and also just kind of cover up the sella foam and the ugly tape and just turn this entire thing into kind of like a fridge door reflectix is the most well known brand but a lot of different companies make this double reflective insulation material which has a variety of uses other than the garage door you can use it on the roof I think most people do you can use it even behind a heating radiator or wherever you need to bounce or stop radiant heat it's not that expensive at around $40 per hundred square feet and you can obviously get them cheaper if you buy in larger sizes but like the Sela foam it's not that complicated of a material it's basically bubble wrap with reflective material stuck on both sides I think one roll of hundred square feet will allow me to complete both doors but I bought two just in case I run out all right so before we go any further let me try to explain to you the two different options that you can go about installing this reflective heat barrier on your garage door and why that matters the original plan was to do something like this where I'm putting the material on top of the metal beam and this kind of lip on the garage door so that it creates an air pocket in between the metal garage door and the material you know the insulation material itself which should get you the highest r-value and the thing to note about our values is that even for the same material depending on how you install it it can come up with a very different result so check this out so this is apparently how you get an r-value of 21 where you're not only double layering it but much more importantly you're leaving an air pocket between the material and the surface that you're trying to insulate from now but that's not how they recommend you install this on a garage door so this has an r-value of only three and they're in they're recommending essentially that you cut out kind of a perfect rectangular piece and put it right up against the garage door the metal panel and that's a second option that you have now so I could actually instead of doing this which is kind of a headache and install because then I would have to cut away kind of the perfect piece around this you know to account for the bolts and not only that I have to keep track of where exactly the bolt holes are so I can reinstall this crossbar but also I don't want to use this aluminum foil tape anymore which I'm sure is a very good product because you guys know what happens when you use tape and the surface gets really hot over time it melts so what that might do is if I ever want to reverse this for whatever reason maybe the HOA doesn't really like me completely blocking out the windows or something like that when I take it out I don't want it to leave a whole bunch of tape residue on this metal surface and this painted surface and making it look really dirty but maybe even worse I don't want it kind of chipping away or peeling the paint here when I take it apart so what I'm gonna do is actually use this automotive or continue using this automotive masking tape instead and trying to you know tape really lightly and neatly around this edge and that tape should you know hold the material for as long as I wanted to but it should be a lot less strong or leave much less residue when I go to remove it then this aluminum tape which I'm not even sure if it will come apart in one piece that might be more like permanent tape anyway so I am going to cut a perfect rectangle right here and place it you know right up against this insulation material if you don't have this obviously you'll put it right next to the garage door itself just like how reflectix apparently recommends but I should you know have a much higher r-value than three because this styrofoam Sela foam layer is a giant in her pocket in itself so I'm not too worried about you know losing our value you all right we're making good progress but I hit a bit of a snag I ran out of the yellow masking tape and I'm not gonna be able to finish this anyway with the yellow masking tape I have plenty of other colored masking tape but I am peculiar enough about these things to care so I'm gonna order more of the yellow ones so that my garage doors don't end up in like three different colors hey guys this is a couple of days later I got more rolls of this yellow tape so we can go and finish the job but before I go ahead and do that I wanted to show you something so it is four o'clock right now and the Sun is beating down on these doors once again it's about 84 degrees outside so not too hot but there's almost no cloud cover so direct sunlight is beating down on these doors so I have this infrared thermometer and if we point it at where it is still completely uninsulated you can see that it's quite hot 130 ish degrees yeah it's pretty warm it's pretty hot to the touch that's not a surprise we already knew that if we point it at where it only has the sella foam layer you can see that it's 85 degrees so that is almost 40 degrees of temperature difference with just a cèlle foam now the if we pointed out where it has a third layer I I put this little masking tape here because I can't use the infrared on if it's a reflective shiny surface so I put this tape right here to measure the temperature and if we go and do that the temperature changes to about 81 degrees so another 4 degrees of difference so I totally understand that the second layer here is kind of overkill doesn't make a huge difference it's probably not worth the effort or the money but I'm doing it anyway but just to be fair if we only have the reflective layer like we have here there is no sella foam behind this behind us it's just a tinted window so if I point it at that's right there then even the cell oh I'm sorry even the reflective barrier by itself takes it down to around 84 and again it's the sunlight is directly hitting this right now so I think the conclusion is you really shouldn't do both I'm doing both just because I'm kind of crazy but just pick one and you should be perfectly fine the double layering thing only makes a marginal difference but I'm pretty satisfied to see how much of a difference it actually makes from a hundred thirty degrees to 80 degrees that is 50 degrees of difference on these garage doors so I'm really excited to kind of finish this up and see what the temperature swings of this garage really now looks like you we alright guys we are all done in here and this took me about three days or about ten hours worth of work of course if you're not doing total overkill like this you probably don't have windows in your garage doors you probably have standard garage doors and you probably don't want to do two layers like I did so for you if you were just trying to do this with one layer and there's no reason why it should take more than three hours worth of work and of course as soon as I finish this we're expecting to get a tropical storm in the area which means I won't get a sunny hot day for about a week so what I'm gonna do is actually release this video and follow up with an update about two weeks later when I can measure the temperature in the garage when it's really sunny and hot and I'll be able to tell you guys exactly how much of a difference this all made so be on the lookout for that but this is it for this episode I'll see you guys later thanks for watching

Channel: Restoration For Beginners

Views: 649,261

Keywords: gila, window film, cellofoam, reflectix, how to insulate garage door, insulation, garage door

Id: QZmuj0mZZOs

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020