If your home has an attached garage, and you are looking for ways to make your home more environmentally friendly and energy efficient, you may not be aware that fitting a new garage door can make a huge difference. However, you have to choose the right garage door for the job.

A high-quality sectional garage door can be an ideal addition to an eco-friendly home. Here are three reasons why sectional garage doors can be more eco-friendly than other types of garage doors, such as single panel doors and roller doors.

Effective Insulation Options

In most homes with attached garages, the garage is not fitted with air conditioning or heating. They also tend to be less well insulated than the homes they are attached to.

As a result, they can get very hot during the summer months, and freezing cold in winter. Hot or cold air from your garage can pass through the garage's interior door and into the rest of your home. This can affect your home's indoor temperature, and force your home's heating and/or cooling systems to use more energy.

Fitting a heavily insulated garage door will drastically improve your garage's heat insulation, helping it stay cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Most modern sectional garage doors are well insulated, as their large, hollow sections can be filled with highly effective insulating foam. They have significantly better insulation properties than roller doors, which are not compatible with insulated foam cores.

A well-insulated sectional garage door can significantly reduce your reliance on air conditioners and heaters, making your home more energy efficient and eco-friendly.

Sealed Against Wind And Drafts

If your garage door is poorly sealed against drafts and high winds, hot and cold air can enter the garage through gaps in and around the garage door. These drafts can also make your garage overly hot or cold, causing similar heat transfer problems as poor door insulation.

Sectional garage doors are fitted with flexible weather seals made from rubber or thermoplastics. These seals are attached to the edges of the door and are also fitted to the gaps between individual door sections. These seals are highly effective at blocking out drafts, boosting the door's ability to prevent unwanted heat transfer.

Do Not Require Powerful Openers

When a sectional garage door opens, it slides up a series of tracks until it sits flush with the garage ceiling. This is similar to the way single panel garage doors open -- however, while single panel doors have to be lifted and rotated into place, the hinged construction of a sectional garage door allows it to slide upwards and backwards in one fluid movement.

This unique opening method uses significantly less energy than lifting and rotating a heavy single panel door into place. This means that sectional garage doors can be used with smaller, less powerful automated openers than single panel doors. Less powerful garage door openers use less energy, reducing your home's overall energy consumption and carbon footprint.

Reach out to a garage door company that has a variety of sectional doors available, including B&D sectional doors, to learn more.