ENERGY EFFICIENT WINDOWS
Energy Efficient Windows – Over recent years you may have heard that the British government has signed up to several international treaties to reduce our green house emissions. To do this our houses need to be more energy efficient and to assist with this the building regulations have been modified to ensure that new products and building methods ensure less heat loss. Many older properties are being improved with loft and cavity insulation. As many houses are having their windows and doors changed. An industry standard was drawn up by the British Fenestration Rating Council (BFRC) to catagorise windows and doors on an ‘A’ to ‘E’ scale, ‘A’ being the most efficient and ‘E’ being the least. Energy efficient windows are becoming and increasingly popular cost saving measure.
The majority of windows now fall into either the ‘A’ or ‘C’ rating, with a ‘C’ rating being the most popular of these two. To raise a ‘C’ rating window to an ‘A’ rated the average ‘U’ values of the entire window needs to achieve 1.4 ‘U’ value against the 1.6 ‘U’ value.
This can be achieved by installing a double glazed unit that contains two skins of low iron glass along with Argon gas within the unit. At the present time obscure glass is not produced as a low iron high efficiency product, so any window requiring obscure glazing will comply with the building regulations but not have an ‘A’ rating.