You show me yours and I’ll show you mine!
Apeer CEO Asa McGillian says the industry is finally waking up to ‘lies’ about thermal efficiency compliance, and throws down the gauntlet to his competitors…
Who could have predicted it? Confusion and obfuscation around thermal efficiencies and U-value claims are coming to light, and installers are waking up to the nefarious, and questionable, U-value claims made by so many manufacturers. We called it months ago – the industry is beginning to catch on.
We have been aware for a long time that there are door manufacturers in this marketplace attaching the compliancy of a single product to numerous doors across an entire range in what we know has been a deliberate move to misinform their customer base. But we know that making wild accusations is both a litigious minefield and can often be perceived as sour grapes.
And if sour grapes have the lingering aftertaste of seeing the tens of thousands of pounds invested in testing and compliancy being wiped out by the false claims of our competitors, then hand me the biggest bunch you can find, because our gloves are about to come off.
It is our version of greenwashing, whereby a single thread of compliancy can be taken and spun into something so much bigger than it actually is.
But Apeer is not a company that has a rant and then moves on. We felt that this issue was so important that we invested our hard earned money in the independent testing of a number of rival door slabs, sending them to the TUV Institute Rheinland.
There, an impartial team undertook full testing to ISO standard ISO 8302:1991 / EN 12667:2001 ‘Determination of Thermal Resistance’, which gave us the thermal resistance numbers for 44mm foam filled, 48mm timber core, 70mm high density foam filled, 70mm hollow monocoque and 100mm high density foam filled slab. The results showed clearly the direct correlation between the thickness of the material, the type of material and the density of the material.
We then undertook further testing with IFT Rosenheim who did a side-by-side Thermal Hot Box test with our 70mm high density foam filled door and a hollow monocoque door and the results proved what we had long suspected – whilst our door met the declared U Value of 0.85 W/m²K (we actually declare 0.9 W/m²K) the competitor’s door did not even meet the required minimum U value of 1.4 W/m²K or anywhere near.
Both independent tests from two of the most reputable test houses in the world lead us to believe that there are a number of false claims being made by seemingly reputable door manufacturers that claim their complete range of products meet the Irish and British building regulations.
We are still contemplating (and in discussions with our lawyers, industry bodies, trading standards and building control) how much of the report should be put out into the public arena in its entirety. Naming names is not an activity we want to get embroiled in. However, it doesn’t take an expert to understand that a door with a 44mm slab cannot have the same thermal performance as a door which is 60% thicker with more than double the density.
Don’t get me wrong, we sell both 44mm and 70mm doors but we don’t claim that they are equal in performance. In the same way it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that a timber core product with low thermal performance in comparison to a high-quality dense foam core can be ‘top performing’ or ‘market leading’, phrases commonly used in advertising both to the trade and more disturbingly to the consumer.
The TUV report shows that a 70mm high density foam core is 3.5x more thermally resistant than the timber core slab that we tested.
Even worse are claims from one of our competitors that a hollow 70mm monocoque slab with zero insulation outperforms our slab with a core manufactured with 110 kg/m³ density structural foam – a claim that defies the law of physics. All these figures are clearly shown within the TUV testing figures making a complete mockery of some of the door manufacturers’ claim to ‘superior’ thermal performance.
It’s time to stop making false claims and have full transparency for all door designs sold, and then audited proof that what is claimed on the paperwork is actually what leaves the manufacturing plant.
Let me spell it out in as simple English as possible to make sure that there is no confusion about Apeer’s verifiable and provable claims:
All 62 designs of Apeer 70mm Door products meet and exceed the Irish and British Building Regulations of a minimum 1.4 W/m²K for replacement doors and 1.0 W/m²K for new build doors and all have been third party tested and audited and can be found on the BFRC website.
And if you are in any doubt at all, we have the official paperwork to back up this claim.
And if any installers would like to cast an eye over the independent testing that we carried out on competitive products, feel free to contact myself directly.
