What your front door warranty actually covers, year by year
Warranty terms usually get one line in a brochure and nothing else. Here is what five years and two years actually mean, what is excluded, and who pays for the call-out in year four.
Written by the Kilgate Doors team, with figures from the manufacturer's documentation and our installer's practice.
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Ask most door companies what the warranty covers and you get a number, five years, two years, ten years, with no explanation of what changes at the boundary. The number on its own tells you almost nothing. Here is what ours actually means, including the part that does not sound as generous as the headline.
Two different clocks, because a door is not one thing
A front door is a structure (the leaf and the frame) with moving parts bolted to it (the lock, the hinges, the seals, the handle hardware). Those two groups wear differently, so they carry different terms.
| Part | Cover |
|---|---|
| Door leaf and frame | 5 years |
| Lock, hinges, seals and other hardware | 2 years |
The structure is the part that is hard to get wrong and expensive to put right, so it gets the long clock. The hardware is the part that moves every day, so it is the part most likely to need attention first, and it is covered for a shorter, clearly stated period rather than folded into the five years with an asterisk.
What changes after year two
The cover is not flat across either period. It splits again.
Years 1 and 2: if a covered part fails, the replacement part, the call-out and the labour are all included. You do not pay for anything.
Years 3 to 5: the replacement part for the door itself is still free. What is no longer included automatically is the visit and the fitting, the time it takes someone to drive out and swap the part. That gets quoted to you in advance, before any work happens, so there is no surprise invoice after the fact.
The reason for the split is straightforward and worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind small print: the door is manufactured in Poland and the parts cover comes from there, while the call-out is a local service we arrange and charge for once the manufacturer's own labour cover runs out. The part itself does not stop being covered because the door is in Ireland. What changes is who is paying for the van.
What the warranty does not cover
This is the list that does not flatter the product, and it is worth reading before you buy rather than after something happens.
- Natural variation in foil colour and grain between production batches. Foils are a real material, not a printed pattern, and no two production runs match exactly under close inspection.
- Condensation on handles, locks or the frame in certain conditions. This is physics (cold metal meeting warm, moist air), not a manufacturing fault, and it is excluded on that basis.
- Flatness within tolerance. The relevant standard, PN-EN 1530, allows a small amount of deviation, up to 2 mm, before a leaf counts as out of true. A door within that tolerance is not a warranty case even if you can see a slight bow with a straight edge against it.
- Touch-up instead of replacement for minor foil marks. A small surface defect is more likely to be repaired with colour-matched touch-up than solved by swapping the whole leaf.
None of these are unusual exclusions. They show up on most serious door warranties once you read past the headline number, and we would rather you heard them from us than found them in the small print later.
Making a claim
Claims go through us, not directly to the manufacturer. Tell us what has happened, we assess it, and a decision follows within 30 days. In practice most straightforward cases (a failed hinge, a lock that has stopped engaging cleanly) move a lot faster than that, but 30 days is the figure we will hold ourselves to on anything that needs checking first.
Keep your invoice. It is the document that starts the warranty clock, dated from the sale rather than from whenever the door happened to be made.
Where this sits next to the SEAI grant
The grant and the warranty are unrelated. The €800 SEAI grant is a one-off payment tied to the purchase and installation of the door, claimed through a registered installer. The warranty is a separate, ongoing promise about the product itself, and it runs exactly the same whether or not you claimed the grant.
The short version
Five years on the door, two years on the moving parts, full cover including labour for the first two years on everything, and parts (but not the visit) free for three years after that. Read the exclusions once, because they are the same four or five things on almost every serious warranty in this category, not a trick specific to us.
If you are still deciding between products, build your door in the configurator to see the actual model you would be buying, or book a free WhatsApp video measurement and ask us anything about warranty terms before you commit to anything.