First and foremost, a storm door will provide an extra layer of security to your home.

Secondly, it will also provide an additional barrier to cold/heat infiltration. You can even improve on that by buying one with insulated or lo e glass.

Third, I think the best feature of a storm door is the screen. These screens provide you with a way to get natural airflow and light in your home during the summer months. In the newer doors, the screens now roll up into the body of the door, which means you don’t even have to worry about screen storage during the winter months.

4) Before you buy:

a) A $99 storm door is exactly what you will get – a bandaid solution that will fall apart quickly. The hinging & latching systems are made with poor quality materials and won’t stand the test of time. Warping will occur quickly because the door panel is a wood core wrapped with an aluminum skin.

It would be better to wait, save up your money and invest in a higher quality door… after all, the install price will be the same, but, your satisfaction and ours will be greater.

b) If you are installing a storm door with an an existing or new fibreglass entry door, remember:

• fiberglass doors are heat sensitive
• storm doors will trap this heat especially in south and west facing placement.

c) Door manufacturer’s recommend that you vent your storm door so that it doesn’t bake/warp your fiberglass entry door. Since storm doors do not come with vents installed, your installer may have to get creative. In one case we left the top piece of trim off to allow for air ventilation.

A better solution is to buy a storm door with a rollaway screen. In the summer time, you can leave the screen down a couple inches, which creates a way for the door to vent.

5) After it is installed:

If you close the exterior door before you close the storm door, 9 times out of 10 the storm door will not latch, even if you have a closer installed.

When you close the exterior door, it is sealed. When you then close the storm door, it will get to a certain point of closing and stop, right before latching because the air between the 2 doors can not escape.

This means that the first wind that blows by will catch your door and rip it off its hinges. The way to avoid this from happening is to always make sure that your storm door latches completely before you walk away.

Door manufacturer’s used to include safety chains with the closers to avoid this. They no longer include these because they interfere with the proper functioning of the rollaway screens.

6) What comes first the door or the storm door?

A new storm door will not cure an old, leaky exterior door.

For this reason, we always recommend that you replace your exterior door first. Then replace the storm door. And always get a professional to measure it for you before you buy it.

About our blog posts: We decided to share what it is like to be on the inside of our family owned business. This will be a review of our past, striving to improve our present and looking with great hope to the future, as we pass the keys over to our adult children Katie and Charlie.

We will do our best to honor this blog writing schedule. But, this will be the last priority in our day – see our listed values for reasons why.

Saturday is Chuck’s perspective; Wednesday is Linda’s. As they will, Katie and Charlie may guest blog.

Monday we are going to talk about doors and intallations, so stay tuned.