THERE SHOULD BE A LOT OF WEATHER- BEATING POTENTIAL IN WHATEVER YOU ARE LOOKING AT. PEOPLE REALLY NEED TO LOOK AT THESE PRODUCTS AND HOW THEY PERFORM IN ALL KINDS OF WEATHER CONDITIONS.
While the eyes may be the window to the soul, the windows in a home have a far more practical role to play. They keep heat in and the cold out, allow us to see the world outside and can have a huge impact on the overall look of any domicile. One of the most popular types of windows on today’s market is triple-pane, low-emissivity (low-e) glass, which has an invisible coating that dramatically reduces heat transfer and reflects heat back into a room. Brad Orr, a building consultant with Star Building Materials, says the ability of low-e glass to reflect radiant heat can have a significant impact on the cost of heating and cooling a home — the air conditioner doesn’t have to run as often in the summer and the furnace doesn’t have to work as hard in the winter. “It’s extremely popular,” Orr says. “Put it this way, when I do windows it’s very seldom anything other than a tri-pane now. Almost everything we do is a version of low-e.” PVC (or polyvinyl chloride) has become the gold standard for window frames. It’s lightweight, durable and offers some of the best R-values available. The one knock against PVC in the past was that it offered little in the way of colour options — you could have white or off-white. That’s hardly the case today, says Jeff Gostick, a project coordinator with Olympic. Several manufacturers now offer a variety of colour choices for PVC frames, using a thermally-bonded style of paint that is mixed in with the plastic.
While esthetics are important, Pelland says homeowners need to consider how well a door or window will stand up to Manitoba’s extreme climate before making a choice. “There should be a lot of weather-beating potential in whatever you are looking at,” he says. “People really need to look at these products and how they perform in all kinds of weather conditions.”
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