Insulated Garage Doors

• 40mm bonded polyurethane core
• Thermal break at every section joint
• Full perimeter seals, all four edges

An insulated garage door has a foam core bonded between two steel or aluminium skins instead of a single sheet of metal. It matters in exactly one situation, and it matters a lot: when the garage is attached to the house, or has become part of it.

When insulation is worth paying for

• The garage is connected to living space. A single-skin door in Highveld sun turns the garage into an oven, and that heat comes through the connecting wall and door into the house all evening. An insulated door stops most of it at the opening.
• The garage has been converted. Flat, studio, gym, office, workshop. Insulate the door and the room becomes usable year-round; leave it single-skin and it never quite does.
• A bedroom sits above the garage. The foam core damps the boom of the door opening and closing. On an early-morning or late-night schedule this is often the real reason people upgrade.
• You store anything heat-sensitive. Paint, wine, electronics, chemicals, a classic car.

How they are made

We build insulated doors as sectional doors: horizontal sections, each a sandwich of galvanised steel or aluminium skins with a rigid polyurethane core injected between them. Standard section thickness is 40mm. The foam is not a loose fill — it bonds to both skins, so the section is stiffer than a single sheet of the same weight and does not drum.

Sections have a thermal break at the joint so the two skins do not touch through the metal, and every section edge carries a seal that closes onto the next one as the door comes down. Around the outside, full perimeter seals run on all four edges: head, both jambs and a bulb seal on the floor that takes up an uneven slab.

What it actually does

Three things, in order of how much you will notice them:

• Temperature. A garage behind an insulated door runs far closer to the temperature of the house than one behind a single-skin door in the same wall.
• Noise. Both the sound of the door itself and traffic noise from the street drop noticeably.
• Dust and rain. The perimeter sealing does more here than the foam. If you have ever swept a Gauteng garage after a windy week, this is the part you will appreciate.

Headroom, and what to do without it

Insulated sectional doors need clear headroom above the lintel for the track and the stacked sections. Where a garage cannot give that, there are low-headroom track kits that recover part of it, and beyond that the honest answer is that a sectional door will not fit. In those garages we get part of the benefit with an insulated roll-up curtain and heavier perimeter sealing instead. Measure from the top of the opening to the ceiling or the nearest beam and send us the number.

Motorisation

Insulated sections are heavier than single-skin ones, so the operator and the spring balance are specified for the finished weight of your door, not from a width table. Motors come with soft start and stop, obstruction detection, rolling-code remotes and battery backup for load-shedding.

Servicing

The seals are the wearing part. They perish in UV over several years and are inexpensive to replace, which restores most of the performance. We check them on every service visit along with spring tension, roller wear and track alignment.

Send us the opening width and height, your headroom, and what the garage is used for. If insulation will not earn its cost on your building, we will tell you that instead of quoting it.