Last Updated on 29 October 2010 by ianr
So what are U Values? What does it all mean to you the home owner? Why should you care?
Well, in a nutshell a U Value measures how well a component (such as a roof, wall, window, or premium quality Global Door) keeps heat inside a building. The higher the U Value, the more heat will flow through, hence a good U Value is a low one as you will want to keep heat inside the building (especially in this country).
If you want to get technical, the U-value describes how much thermal energy in Watts [W] is physically transported through a building component with the size of 1 square meter [m²] at a temperature difference of 1 Kelvin [K] (=1ºC). Thus the unit for U-values is W/(m²K).
This month has seen the Government introduce new U Value regulations, that state that all doors sold and fitted in England and Wales must have a U Value of 1.8W/m2K or less. It is 1.6W/m2K in Scotland. Put simply, the better the U Value the more energy efficient your door will be.
Global door already met the criteria set in the new regulations long before most people were concerned with U Values and our doors perform very well. We are so proud of the way our doors perform in this field, we now supply a U Value certificate with every composite door that we make. This means that home owners will have a written certificate stating the U Value of their front door. Our certificates are different from the competition; rather than mass producing a generic document showing the U Value range the door falls into (technically this is adequate however not much use to the home owner seeking to improve their energy efficiency), each one of our doors has the exact U Value calculated for that particular door-set.
