Saturday, October 20, 2012

Review: Maine built PH doors?


This is a review of entry swing doors made by Linwood Windows and Doors out of their shop in Rockwell, Maine. Linwood is a classic small shop with an interesting story and a good vision for high quality and performance. According the owner Richard Cohen, they bought a german tooling system for their windows and doors that are apparently certifiable in Germany for Passive House projects. The company is new and you can follow their progress on their blog.http://linwoodwindows.blogspot.com/

We ordered two entry doors for a 1840's farmhouse deep energy retrofit. It was important to have well insulated doors with high performance windows. Cohen said he could deliver doors with R5+ thermal performance but has not done any testing of the doors to provide any data for heat transfer or air leakage for their doors as a unit.

The design of the door is a rebated, double gasket European style door with classic raised panel and 1/2 glass. The raised panels have 1" of EPS foam with 3/4" of Doug Fir on either side.
The triple paned windows are quoted to have SHGC of .56 and Uvalue of .155 or R6.4. Richard thought that the whole door Uvalue would be better than the raised panel section but failed to explain how a 80"x36" door with 46% of the door only 2.5 inches of Doug Fir at ~ R3. I am assuming the glass has warm edge spacers.
 I would put the overall thermal performance of the door at around R4. This doesn't take into account the door frame or losses from air leakage.

We did install 1" polyiso foam around the frame to lessen the heat loss around the frame. The door frames and door construction are designed and built well.

A few complaints: we ordered the door without a finish and had to sand off a bit of glue stain and we had to take off the hardware to clean out the mortises of sawdust that was clogging the mechanism.  Everything fit well including the Zenit ball bearing adjustable hinges. Their were 4 hinges to secure the very heavy 3" door. We installed the door very easily and were happy with the squareness and ease of fitting.

 The biggest problem was the hardware.  Apparently the hardware company and Linnwood were not on the same page as the lock cylinders did not fit.  We got a replacement set that didn't fit and another that was stainless steel to match the oil rubber bronze handles.  So we sent those back and found the right fit and finish on our own.  The GU multipoint system was also a little futsy.  As I have used Hoppe systems as well, I would probably trade them out.

After it was all in, we inspected the air-tighness of the doors during a blower door test and found small leaks in both bottom corners of the door where the double gasket transitioned to the sweep sealed door bottom.  Minor, but considering I was able to completely seal all around conventional doors with off the shelf weatherization components, I would expect more from a $2300 door.