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Before you buy...
Doors
Related Product Advice
The more doors a home has, the more opportunity for serious waste of material and energy. Ensure that your exterior doors are airtight, and that your interior doors have enough airflow beneath them to keep your home comfortable. Door options include solid, hollow, reclaimed, or composite wood, and several kinds of plastic and metal.
Doors are often a considerable but overlooked material resource in a home, since even the smallest house may have ten of them. When wood was more common and less expensive, homes used solid core wood doors; today hollow core doors are frequently used.
Consider the resource conservation value when selecting your doors. The resource efficiency concerns for doors are the R-value and the resource consumption properties. Low maintenance is also of significant value. Doors made of wood, recovered wood, wood composite and metal are all possible options.
Traditional solid wood doors are becoming increasingly expensive. By contrast, fiberglass or metal door skins provide a durable and inexpensive alternative. The lightweight foam cores available in exterior fiberglass and steel doors provide good insulation, and can have five times the R-value of a solid wood door. Most of the fiberglass door skins available today replicate the texture of traditional solid wood doors, but offer increased weather resistance. Other choices include wood fiber cores. Most of the wood fiber used in doors is recovered as a by-product of other wood processing operations. Some fire-rated doors have fiber-cement cores that also utilize recovered wood fiber. Many of these options are available in interior or exterior styles.
Top-Rated Products
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Molded Panel SeriesAll designs and most sizes are available with hollow core construction. All designs and sizes are |
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Before you buy... Exterior Doors
Exterior doors with magnetic seals offer superior air infiltration protection. Compression seals are also good, but not to the quality of a magnetic seal. A good door will seal tightly, be low maintenance, and keep heat or cool from escaping.
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