Cold along bottom of patio door

BarraOG

I bought a thermal leak detector recently and the coldest point by far in our house is along the bottom the patio door in the kitchen at both the sliding and non sliding parts. Condensation forms on the glass and metal frame and is ruining the skirting and floor as seen in the picture. I left a 1cm expansion gap between patio door frame and floor. Is there anything I can do to fix this problem?

10-10-20

From what I have seen that detail is very poorly executed in most houses up until about 10 years ago. Often the reveal cavity isn't closed right or is closed using a return brick which forms a thermal bridge around the window/door. Then to top off the poor blockwork finish, the doors were often mechanically installed with little attention given to insulating and closing the air-gap; often the door threshold is left floating on the lower blocks with no under-fill. Certainly mine was like that on two cheap-ass French doors.

Proper remediation of the wall reveals would involve installing insulated plasterboard to resolve the thermal bridge and mould issue, but the door bottom and threshold would be a different issue. To remediate that in-situ is tricky and often calls for expanding foam. When you were fitting the floor, do you remember how the sub-floor transitioned to the blocks at this at this point? Is the door physically sitting on the internal or external leaf or hovering over the cavity? Also is there a gap between the PVC threshold and block/concrete which could be back-filled?

Out of interest, what detector did you get and how much? Was it useful and sensitive enough?

BarraOG

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118553891#Comment_118553891

Thanks for your reply. I'm going to get a BER assessor out soon to have a look at our house in general so I'll ask him to advise us how we should proceed with this problem. The detector is very good I think, its a Black and Decker device and it shines different colours on the wall with respect to a reference temperature:

https://www.blackanddecker.com/product-repository/products/2015/02/01/03/14/tld100

10-10-20

Interesting device and concept. A laser temperature probe with a few features added.