While driving around you probably noticed many have screens on the garage, some are motorized and some are horizontal sliders. If you're like us, and want to keep your garage door open, I highly recommend putting on the screen door. I've had one neighbor find a rattlesnake in his garage under his car, and we've had gators leave the executive course and take a stroll through the neighborhood. Plus if your laundry is inside the garage like ours, it gives the heat a way to escape.
After you have the screen installed, you'll probably also have attic steps installed inside your garage, a lot of free storage space up there. Crack the attic step opening about a foot. Standing directly below the steps you should feel a nice breeze coming into the garage up toward the steps. My electric bills on our CYV were running in the $105 range and since we started doing this, our bills have been in the $80's and $90's all summer long.
If you do a search on this site, you'll see this has all been discussed many times before and some have said the garage/home firewall will be breached if you keep the attic access open. I guess everything has a trade off, with a masonry CYV I'll willing to take the risk. Anyway, times when we're asleep the garage door is going to be closed anyway, and we have 3 smoke detectors inside our home.
This is our setup, and as you can see we went with the horizontal sliders on our 12' door. It's also half the price of the motorized units. However, mainly I went with this style was because I'm often outside in the yard, or washing the car, talking with neighbors, I found the sliders are great because you open just one little 3' section and slide it back behind when you exit. Those with the motorized one piece screens will open the screen and then not lower it back until they've gone back inside. So while they're outside the garage is unprotected.
