Garage Doors & the Eco-Friendly Home

3 ways your garage doors can help support an eco-friendly home

If protecting the environment and conserving resources and energy is important to you, you’re probably always on the lookout for ways to make your home and your lifestyle more eco-friendly. Have you considered how your garage doors can help support this goal? Here are 3 ways your garage doors can contribute to an eco-friendly home.

Save Trees

Wood is probably one of the most desirable materials for garage doors, especially on high-end homes with custom garage doors. However, you may have concerns about using wood if you don’t know where it came from or that it was sustainably harvested. Fortunately, you can get the look of wood without cutting a single tree by using either reclaimed wood or ECO-Alternative faux wood materials. ECO-Alternative materials also have the advantage of not needing to be refinished or repainted like real wood does, which means you don’t have to use any chemical solvents that could harm the environment when maintaining your faux wood garage doors.

Improve Energy Efficiency

Getting a high-quality garage door with insulation and weather stripping can drastically improve the energy efficiency of your garage. The less energy you have to use to heat or cool your garage, the better. This helps reduce your carbon footprint because you’re taking less power from the grid. Having an energy-efficient home can help boost your resale value as well as your peace of mind about your personal impact on the environment.

Go Off the Grid

It is surprisingly easy to convert your garage door opener to solar power. In most cases, all you need to do is purchase a kit that includes a solar panel, a small backup battery for nighttime operation, and a circuit board. Simply remove your current garage door opener’s transformer and you’re ready to convert to solar. A small setup like this can provide enough power to open and close your garage door several times per day off of just 4 hours of sunlight. In terms of ease of operation, you won’t know the difference. But in terms of impact on the environment, every little bit of juice not taken from the dirty power sources fueling the grid helps. To reduce the amount of power used even further, you might want to consider shortening the automatic timer on your garage door opener’s light so that it doesn’t remain on for too long once you’ve already left the garage.
If you’re interested in learning more about eco-friendly garage door features and equipment, feel free to contact the pros at Dynamic Garage Door.