Obviously there would be some benefits to having an alternative to a multipurpose all year garage door option. You could focus on insulation during the colder months in a variety of different ways to make sure that your garage is staying warm and not losing you any heat from your home. You could also use a material that could handle the cold better and one that was fitted to your garage during the winter so that the installation would be better by not needing to account for the increases or decreases in size that come with the fluctuations of temperature. What you could imagine as your winter garage door is one single piece of a material that might let light through but otherwise be insulated to things like losing warm air. This will help keep the warmth in your home while you even get some heat from the sun being able to get into your garage during the day. For the summer you would essentially want something the opposite of that to combat the possibility of your garage getting overheated and that spilling over to your home. This means something like a screen or mesh combined with an opened gird of metal on the outside might be the best possibility. Keeping as much airflow as possible while at the same time keeping your garage door strong and secure from things like lighter rains and any unwanted visitors. You would change these out at when you felt it was time to make the switch, but otherwise would only need to be switched once a year to keep things simple.
So why aren’t we doing this? If it cut down on out energy bills and made a relatively noticeable difference it seems like there would not be too much stopping us from doing this as homeowners. However, there are some caveats. Buying two garage doors means that you are paying for two garage doors. This may mean that your garage doors perform their jobs better and may even last longer, but if they don’t last close to twice as long and don’t provide a significant increase in performance this type of thing just won’t catch on. People are not worried enough about things like energy prices to pay big upfront costs for what may pay off in the long run. On top of the cost of buying two specialized garage doors is the cost of getting them installed and uninstalled. Unless you are a professional garage door installer you will most likely need to pay for the garage doors to be changed every six months or so which means another cost on top of the second to implement the idea of two garage doors. This means that those benefits from having a winter and summer garage door or a fall/winter and a spring/summer garage door have to be pretty great to offset the costs and hassle of having to have your garage doors changed out every half year. Finally there is the problem of storing a second garage door. You won’t need to have it extremely accessible, but if you are having it take out and changed twice a year you won’t want it to be too tough to get to. Garage doors are also usually quite large and so will end up taking up a lot of space. This means you may even take up a portion of your garage with your secondary garage door.
Until the differences between a winter garage door and summer garage door really make a huge difference it seems there are a lot of obstacles that need to be overcome. While sometimes changing things with the seasons is a good idea it seems that with garage doors just don’t make enough of a difference to warrant that kind of specialization. Garage doors are generally doing a pretty good job given what they are trying to accomplish and improving upon them has to be a pretty good improvement for it to be a worthwhile enough adoption. This is why in many cases you will find that older homes still have older garage doors and garage door openers, the technology continues to be improved, but many times the benefits of overhauling an older system really isn’t worth it. Garage doors are not extremely expensive, but there is often no reason to make changes to a garage door that is not vulnerable to any safety concerns unless the cost is negligible. Garage doors may in the future become extremely specialized based on your needs and that may include the idea of different garage doors for different seasons, but that isn’t the case at the moment because the costs related to that sort of an endeavor just wouldn’t be worth it most likely.