My 50-year old bungalow is gradually being updated. Part of it is to replace a dilapidate unusable garage with an extension.
The architect surprised me when he said that we had to have a rear door to our garden for fire safety reasons.
Aesthetically bi-fold doors seemed appropriate.
Every existing window and door is made of uPVC and is aging well, so I assumed that that the new door would be the same but the builder has specified aluminium. I want to minimise heat loss by conductivity and would prefer uPVC.
Modern aluminium frames have thermal breaks so there's minimal conductivity to the outside. It's not quite as good as UPVC, but it's pretty good. It's certainly nothing like the bare alu frames we used to get in the 70s and 80s.
I think alu frames are more stable and resistant to expansion issues in the heat. You can get them powder coated white so they match your UPVC.
The main advantage when replacing a sliding door or patio style door is that you can then fully open the entire space rather than just half of it, creating less of a division between the spaces.
The other situation where they are handy is where there is insufficient space to accommodate an open door.
Removing a physical boundary between a room and the "outside".
How lacking in imagination does one have to be to ask an obnoxious question like that?
If properly implemented there is no reason a bifold should be any more difficult to open or close than a conventional patio door.
If you want uPVC, to match the existing, then insist on it. You are the customer, not the builder. He wants to do aluminium frames because it's 'the latest thing.' (And there might be more in it for him, I don't know.) Whichever you go for, the frame and hinges should be able to cope with the weight.
Seems a little odd there are new build starter homes around here in square block form each with only one door into them. Yes that's right almost back to the back to back designs of the olden days!
But why would you need to do this ?. Apart from those odd occasions when you buy a new settee or need to carry awkward shaped objects in or out, what is this wierd obsession with allowing dust and unwanted heat in/out through a massive opening ?.
I am sure you can think of some scenarios if you try...
e.g. You are having a party / bbq / family get together. Your main reception room opens out on to a patio. It's a nice summers day, and you want to be able to move freely from one space to the other. The bifold option lets you open the entire end of the room, and a patio door only half of it.
Indeed I can see it must be beyond your comprehension...
Yep. We do exactly that with our bi-folds. Oddly a bonus is you don't end up with loads of insects in the room unable to escape, because they all manage to thanks to that 6m x 2m portal back into the outside world, rather than repeatedly banging their heads on the glass from the inside.
Certainly no draught problems, as for security, well, it has the same locking arrangements at one end as a conventional exterior door. As the, in our case, five panels slide along and fold up in a zig-zag manner, it would be almost impossible to lever them out of the upper and lower frames. They have locking pins top and bottom too. The end door operates as a normal outwardly opening door (albeit very wide) if you leave the other four doors locked in position. It goes back 180 degs 'back to back' with door 2. There's a plastic/magnetic buffer to hold it, but it doesn't take much of a breeze to make it move, so we stick a large 10kg doorstop on the ground.
We do try to keep the glide rails very clean, they are PTFE by the look and feel of them.
When we did the back of the house about 10 years ago we decided on bifolds.
Two things we were told (to the best of my failing memory):
(1) Large plastic bifolds tend to cause more problems long term because they expand and contract more than aluminium. [At least, that was the advice 10 years ago.]
(2) You should have a "traffic door" which will open like a conventional door to avoid having to do any folding of doors to get in and out. I can't recall fire regulations but it makes a lot of sense to have more than one exit from the house. Much as you have to have special windows to allow escape from upstairs if the stairs are on fire.
We have 5 panels, and are still very pleased with the whole arrangement.
The folding doors work particularly well in the summer as they open out onto a covered deck so you can have a true "indoor/outdoor" arrangement. We chose doors without a bottom lip so that there is no impediment to going in and out. Important, for example, for wheelchair users. Nice to have anyway.
I don't think heat loss should be3 a major issue - at least we had to have an energy survey as part of the planning approval and there were no issues with the aluminium doors.
Security - the folding doors (4) have locks and pins which go top to bottom to prevent the door being opened by an intruder. The traffic door has a conventional lock.
Draughts - tight as a ??? (cow's arse in fly time? Ducks arse?).
You do get some extra heat loss in winter due to the large area of glass, but IIRC this is more than offset by the solar gain when the sun shines.
Anyway, we are very pleased.
Oh, and the rest of the house is white PVC and the aluminium doors are a pale grey/green. They don't look out of place.
I've found out bi-fold door very easy to open and close: you pull on the handle 2/3 of the way along to get those two panes closed, and then close the remaining part of the door as a conventional door 1/3 of the way along. My wife sometimes has problems betting the door fully closed so the handle can be fully raised to make the bolts shoot from the door into the frame so the key can be locked, but I very rarely have problems with that.
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