The entrance or exit to your home should always serve two primary purposes. It should make an impression and it should protect you from the elements and potential threats. As such, choosing the right external doors for your home is a far more important task than choosing interior doors, which might make an aesthetic difference, but won’t have much of an impact on how your home works for you. With external doors, however, pleasing aesthetics, solid build quality and durability are vital attributes. Here, we’ll be taking you through the three main types of external door available (Composite, Wood and uPVC), and in the process, hopefully, help you decide which will work for you and your home.
Composite Doors
A composite door is, in essence, a ‘best of’ collection of door materials, which effectively erases many of the flaws associated with other doors by using a combination of materials, all chosen for their specific, beneficial properties. A typical composite external door will be made up of materials including various woods, PVC, insulating foam and glass-reinforced plastic. The result is a door with higher thermal resistance (due to the insulating foam), greater resistance to weathering and a look that won’t discolour or fade over time like a wooden door and is generally more secure and durable than a uPVC door. The price, however, might reflect this, as composite doors are comfortably the most expensive option of the three.
Wooden doors
We won’t pretend to know you don’t know what a wooden door is, but what is important to understand, when making your choice, is the differences between conventional wooden doors and composite doors. A standard hardwood door will generally be built from a single wood or multiple kinds of wood and will be just that. There will be none of the extra layering and treatment associated with composite doors, which many buyers do prefer as they feel it’s more solid and ‘genuine’.
UPVC Doors
Commonly known by industry bods as rigid PVC, uPVC stands for unplasticised polyvinyl chloride and is a stable and safe plastic material that has become very common as a building material for exterior doors in the last 50 years due to its water-resistant and recyclable nature.