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6.2 Garage, Loading, and Equipment Doors

This part of the Energy Efficiency Manual presents the energy conservation measures that apply to large industrial and garage doors. Industrial doors are immense holes in the building envelope, through which the heat and cooling inside a building easily spills into the outdoors. It is virtually impossible to maintain normal temperatures in a space that has a large door that is kept open. Even reduced levels of conditioning are very expensive to maintain. To avoid this energy waste, you need efficient doors, and you need to keep them closed.

For existing garage and industrial doors, you will learn the essential maintenance activities, how to install infiltration seals and weatherstripping, and how to install powered door operators.

You will also learn how to select new doors. These include high-efficiency exterior doors and supplemental interior doors. Large exterior doors operate slowly, so they tend to be left open for long periods. This wastes the efficiency benefit of the door. You can deal with this problem by installing quick-acting power doors, impact doors, or strip curtains inside the primary exterior doors. These can remain closed most of the time without interfering with traffic.

Interior doors are especially important in applications such as refrigerated warehouses and food freezing facilities, where there are large temperature differences between interior spaces.

Loading docks and truck docks are major sources of heat loss. When a vehicle is located at the dock, most air leakage can be eliminated by installing effective seals between the dock and the vehicle. Here you learn the types of dock seals and how to install them.