Does Triple Glazing Make Sense Bit by bit, we are being encouraged to switch from double to triple glazing. You may not have noticed yet but the pressure is on to improve the energy performance of windows and we are now reaching the stage where mere double glazing will no longer be enough. The rough and ready method of comparing the energy performance of windows is to use the U value measurement, just as we do with walls, floors and roofs. Traditional windows, with a single pane of glass in them, have a U value in excess of 5. Double glazing used to score over 3, but, over the years, the manufacturing process has undergone a number of improvements and currently the Building Regulations insist that any window you install today should have a U value no worse than 1. Tubular-Daylighting-Devices.png?ssl=1' alt='How Much Does It Cost To Have Skylights Installed Cost' title='How Much Does It Cost To Have Skylights Installed Cost' />Shop triple glazing for your home. These improvements have been brought about by the introduction of Wider cavities between the two glass panes 1. Low emissivity coatings being added to the glass to stop heat escaping. The cavity being filled with an inert gas, usually argon. Designing out cold bridges, such as aluminium spacers, surrounding the glazed units. Now, a U value of 1. U value demanded for walls currently less than 0. Hence the tremendous pressure to improve their performance even further. MORE Buyers Guide to RooflightsShould we Switch to Triple Glazing Opinion is divided. How does solar power work Are you ready for a solar powered home Learn more about how to get started, how much solar will cost, and what you can gain from switching. Bit by bit, we are being encouraged to switch from double to triple glazing. You may not have noticed yet but the pressure is on to improve the energy performance of. Over 11 million people have used CostOwl to research average prices and over 350,000 visitors have used our free Request For Quote toolHow Much Does a Garage Door Cost Cost factors include the type of door you choose, the materials its made from, the size of the garage door and its style. How Much Does Colorbond Fencing CostIf youre doing a DIY job, purchase Colorbond fencing from a large hardware supplier. The retail fencing costs might be. Triple glazing is widely used in cold climate countries like Sweden and Norway, and the ultra low energy Passiv. Haus standard requires triple glazed windows with a U value of no more than 0. To get a window with such a low U value, you have to not only switch to triple glazing but also insulate the frame itself, as well as using more expensive manufacturing techniques the gas krypton tends to be used, instead of argon. MORE Choosing Window FramesNow, though a U value as low as 0. But there is a little more to it than this. The key benefits are really to do with comfort. If you insulate the walls, roof and floor of a house, and you ignore the glazing, you end up with cold spots surrounding the windows at night, which cause draughts, draw heat away from you if you sit next to them, and result in streams of condensation running down the panes. So, in essence, the standard of glazing has to match the standard of the insulation elsewhere in the house, so that the warm wrapping around the house performs consistently. Microsoft Windows Vista All Dvd Key Largo on this page. MORE How to Solve CondensationWhich is where triple glazing comes in. Because if double glazing makes a modern house more comfortable to live in, triple glazing makes it even more so. The physics involved here have been worked out in Germany by the Passiv. Haus Institute. It has shown what happens to surface temperatures on various forms of glazing when it gets really cold outside, and the internal air temperature is designed to be at 2. C Next to a single glazed window, the internal surface temperature is around 1C. Next to a double glazed window 2. C. Next to a modern, energy efficient double glazed window, the surface temperature is 1. C. Next to a triple glazed window, with a centre pane U value of just 0. C. So you can see that whilst a double glazed window is perfectly adequate, a triple glazed one is just that much more comfortable, because it hangs onto heat just that little bit better. So whilst triple glazing may make little difference to your heating bills, you will notice the difference inside the house. The Passiv. Haus standard promotes the use of triple glazing for precisely this reason i. Heat Absorption. To make things more complex, windows behave rather differently to walls and roofs in that, when the sun is shining, they are capable of absorbing heat. In fact, the very best double glazed windows are already capable of being net heat contributors over the course of a heating season. In contrast, triple glazed windows slightly reduce the heat absorption characteristics of a window. To reflect these complexities, the British Fenestration Rating Council has devised a scheme for the energy labelling of windows, from A down to G. The top rating is reserved for windows that are reckoned to absorb as much heat as they lose, and they include both double and triple glazed windows. The upshot of this is that there are many who argue that triple glazing simply doesnt make sense in a climate like ours. Triple glazing is more costly to produce, produces much heavier sections and has an embodied energy approximately 5. Will it Stop ThereWindow manufacturer Scheiwiller in Switzerland is producing quadruple glazing i. There are, however, technical problems with simply adding more and more panes of glass not only does the resulting window become ridiculously heavy, but the additional panes stop light coming through. In fact, in terms of energy efficiency, there may even be a fall off as the amount of sunlight the window can absorb is reduced. It is more likely that future developments in window technology will evolve around new coatings, or phase change materials which absorb heat in sunlight and release it at night. Look out for Glass. X, produced by another Swiss company, which is already manufacturing a product that does this. An alternative option that might make more sense is to revisit the traditional practice of drawing curtains across windows after dark. It may be low tech, in comparison with glazed cavities filled with krypton, but its something of a natural British habit and it does cut down on heat loss. Perhaps its time we paid attention to improving the heat retention characteristics of curtains and blinds, rather than continuing to engineer glazing units to ever lower and lower U values. Calculate how much your new project will cost to build with our free Build Cost Calculator.