ProVia Blog

By Wes Ley,

Low-e storm doors can be a simple way to increase the energy efficiency of your entry door. This makes sense because low-e stands for low emissivity, and involves using a thin, invisible coating that minimizes the amount of infrared and ultraviolet light that come through the glass. In the wintertime, low-e lets radiant heat pass through but doesn’t allow it to come back out, which means it can help retain heat within your home. In the summertime, it helps keep some of the heat out. The UV protection also helps prevent fading of items inside your home. 

When you have a low-e storm door on top of an entry door, it allows heat through the glass, but it doesn’t let that heat to go back out. This creates an extreme pocket of heat between the storm door and the entry door, which is known as a heat sink. This trapped hot air can create a variety of issues such as warping the glass trim on the entry door, or even warping and bowing the entire entry door itself. If your low-e storm door is exposed to high heat or direct sunlight, it’s important to vent it to release the trapped hot air.

If you don’t have proper ventilation of the storm door, this can become especially problematic in the wintertime. During the day, the sun hits the storm door and creates heat. Then, when the sun goes away and you have cold temperatures outside, this can basically freeze the storm door. I’ve seen storm doors where the glass was just a sheet of ice because condensation is created when the cold hits the warmer air trapped inside the storm door and then it freezes.

Using a low-e storm door without adequate ventilation creates a variety of problematic issues, and that’s why we don’t recommend them for certain applications.

Since the beginning of 2017 we’ve observed several notable trends involving entry doors, replacement windows, manufactured stone, and vinyl siding. We find these to be excellent indicators of opportunities in the marketplace, so we’ll share these trends with you in a series of blog posts. Today, let’s begin with trends we’re seeing in the sales of entry doors.

Replace and Remodel Continues to Grow

I’d like to begin with a couple comments about the replace and remodel (R&R) market. This market has continued to grow at a nice manageable percentage over the past few decades, and I don’t see that changing over the next couple of years. Homeowners are still remodeling or adding on, and they’re staying in place in their homes. At the same time, the new home construction market has grown nicely over the past couple years as well. Builders have been concentrating on larger, more upscale homes, and that’s left the first-time buyer out of purchasing a new home. This improves the remodeling market because first-time buyers are buying existing homes and fixing them up.

Sales of Fiberglass Entry Doors Growing Faster

With regard to entry doors, fiberglass continues to grow at a faster pace than steel doors. This doesn’t mean that fiberglass has overtaken steel door sales – steel is still our largest sales category here at ProVia.