Sea Change

I guess I've been aware of dual pane windows for a long time.  My parents had a custom home built in 1979 and typical of his cut-corners-everywhere-possible-because-I-underbid-it approach to my parents' retirement dream home he used very cheap dual pane windows.  They were bronze aluminum, clear glass, with about a 1/4" airspace. Five large sliding windows faced due south and just got baked by the sun so that within a few short years condensation was permanently between the glass.  So much heat came through them that we had to install pull down shades to control the Solar Heat Gain (back then there was no such term).  Between the shades inside and outside the house, the condensation, and the heat it made the living room very special indeed.  

Then again this was a long time ago, and dual pane window technology has come a long way since. When I was first hired by All Weather in 1995 I had no idea that in that year we would offer single most significant improvement in windows and was going to change the entire industry!  That was the year we first introduced Low-E2 (pronounced low-e "squared", not "two") in our windows.  Prior to this glass "coating" low emissivity glass was called pyrolytic ("pyro" as in fire) as it was applied when hot glass came out of an oven during the manufacturing process and as it cools it becomes part of the glass itself. It is very durable, and works well reflecting a homes radiant heat loss back inside.  This "hard coat" low-e was great for the East Coast, Midwest, Northwest, and generally anywhere it was cold or it snowed.  But for California not so much. You see we have long hot summers, short intense winters.  This new glass coating (I'll tell you why I use that term in another post) was the only thing that reflected the majority of short wave intense direct radiation away from the glass.  Pyrolytic low-e did not do that very well in our state even though many sold it as high performance glass. 

Only a few years later, in 1999, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency introduced the Energy Star program for windows.  For the first time the Federal Gubmint would recommend the windows performance recommendation be based on the climate zone where they lived.  That's when everybody started paying attention to all those crazy letters and numbers like u-value and SHGC to meet these new guidelines.  The large electric utility monopoly in this state (P.G. & E) actually started classes to teach contractors about these ratings since many had no idea what the numbers meant.  We, as window manufacturer sales reps, looked at it as a marvelous opportunity to meet prospective window installing contractors to get them to sell our windows.

It worked.