When a door is not a door

The old saying “When is a door not a door?”……..“When it’s a-jar?” It is certainly true that in this energy conscious age, purely in thermally efficiency terms alone, an external door is not actually a door (in the energy saving sense) when it is a-jar, as whilst open it is letting out all the energy that has been generated by the property’s heating system, plus more importantly letting the cold in!

An external door is also not a door in practical terms when it is a-jar in the security sense either, as an external door is designed to provide access and egress for the owners of the property, along with their friends, family and visitors. Nowadays you don’t find many householders in this country who leave their front and/or back doors unlocked at night! Some old fashioned folk, still choose to risk leaving their external doors open during the day, but if they were to be burgled their insurance company would not pay them anything. In today’s modern society, most insurance companies insist on multi-point locking for front and back doors, and sometimes require an additional deadlock, and unless when you leave your property you lock both locks, its contents will not be insured, despite the fact you have paid a premium.

External doors are a common cause of draughts and leaks in most homes, so fitting replacement double glazed or even triple glazed residential external doors is a sure way to reduce the amount of heat your property is losing as a result of retaining old inefficient external doors. The added bonus is that multi-locking comes as standard on virtually every aluminium, composite and UPVC double glazed external door in the British marketplace. By raising the door handles vertically on these high security external doors, one not only activates the locking mechanisms, but also engages the gaskets around the door frame, which creates a seal, keeping out the cold, reducing draughts and keeping expensive heat inside.

An external door is neither a container (i.e. a jar!) when it is open or shut, but when open it does let the cold outside in and the warmth stored inside out. Thermally efficiency wise, your property will greatly benefit by fitting it with high quality double glazed external doors, and obviously will benefit even more if you install a triple glazed UPVC front door, back door or a set of triple glazed French doors.

Aluminium double glazed residential doors are excellent replacement external doors in terms of added energy efficiency and security, however the most thermally efficient and secure doors are the top of the range composite front doors, and also engineered timber doors (both of which are available as “Secured By Design”). The downside is that high quality double glazed composite front doors and engineered timber front doors, do cost a lot more than UPVC or aluminium replacement doors, but when it comes to saving energy, the security of your home and fantastic aesthetic appearance, do you really want to compromise and settle for second or third best? Even though Hazlemere’s composite door ranges are amongst the most expensive types of replacement doors in their High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City showrooms, they are still Hazlemere’s best-selling front doors, a fact which rather tells its own story.

That said, when it comes to replacement back doors, kitchen doors or French doors opening into the garden or onto the patio, most owners in Southern England are more than happy to install UPVC or aluminium doors as their back door or kitchen door, given these areas are usually more secure in the first place, and the double glazed replacement aluminium doors or UPVC doors are a dramatic improvement both security wise and thermally wise on the old leaky and draughty doors.

So when is a door not a door?………When it is not securely shut!