External Bifold Door Thermal Efficiency

External bi-fold doors are a lot larger than your standard door. This means they have a much larger surface area for heat to dissipate through. It’s extremely important that your new bifold door is manufactured to deliver the best in thermal performance to ensure the best energy efficiency for your whole home.

Here at Aspire Doors we aim to deliver high quality doors that not only look great, but are manufactured with thermal efficiency in mind. Our long lasting external bifold doors are designed to out-perform standard thermal efficiency regulations to keep your energy bills down. But what does all that mean? In this article we aim to answer your questions about external bifold door thermal efficiency.

What is a U-Value?

What does the U-value actually mean? U-values describe how effective a material is as an insulator. With external doors in particular, it looks at how well they keep heat inside your home and nastier weathers out. Not only will this keep your home warm, but will mean you’ll use less energy heating your home. Less energy will be wasted and overall your heating bills will be reduced.

When looking for a new door and reading the U-Value, remember: the lower the U-value, the less heat is lost. So the lower, the better.

At Aspire Doors, all of our external bifold doors are compliant with – and regularly exceed – Part L of the UK building standards. This requires that all external doors should have a U-value of 1.8w/m2k or less.

Weather Proof External Bifold Doors

The sturdy design of our bifold doors are manufactured with multi-point locking systems. Along with additional weather seals, these thermally efficient patio doors are fantastic for keeping out the elements.

Quite often, ill-manufactured doors are the biggest leak of warmth in your home. This is especially true if the seals around them are of low quality. To ensure that external doors perform to a high standard, we use high quality materials to construct the door to ensure you get a well-made product.

Which Type of Door is the Most Energy-Efficient?

When it comes to external doors, the two most common materials used are timber and uPVC. Although uPVC doors offer better energy efficiency than wood, they are less efficient to make. Wooden doors are much more environmentally friendly to manufacture, and also offer high levels of energy efficiency and low U-value ratings.

Looking specifically at external bifold doors, there are two main styles: wooden and aluminium bi-fold doors.

Aluminium Bi-fold Doors

Aluminium is a lightweight metal and is naturally a poor insulator. Therefore aluminium has been considered to offer poor thermal efficiency in the past. However many aluminium doors now feature a ‘thermal break’. The thermal break is included within the construction of the door and is made from a conductive material, improving the energy efficiency of the door.

As opposed to an internal bifold doors, an aluminium bifold door used on the exterior of a home should feature thermal breaks to implement increased thermal efficiency.

Wooden Bi-Fold Doors

Timber has long been used to manufacture doors due to its versatile nature, beautiful finish and the thermal properties offered by the finished door.

Wooden bi-folding doors offer many benefits. Including those mentioned above, wooden doors can be painted to suit your internal decor. If you feel your doors need a change or colour, you can paint bi-fold doors to suit your taste.

On top of the material used, most bifold doors will feature double glazing or even triple glazing. These manufacturing processes thoroughly increase any home’s thermal efficiency.

Timber bi-fold doors offer a slightly lower energy efficiency than aluminium doors (around 0.1W/m2). However, the benefits of their styling, finish and versatility are enough for many homeowners to overlook the minimal difference in thermal efficiency and consider wood over aluminium.

Find Out More

As expert door suppliers, all of our products are built to last, surviving the test of time for many years to come. To find out more about our external bi fold doors, please contact us.