When you become a homeowner, it opens you up to a whole new world—especially if you bought an older or fixer-upper type of home. Your conversations with other homeowners tend to revolve around home repairs, home improvement projects, home equity, and other topics related to your new life as a home and property owner. Your Google history may be dominated by “how-to” searches, and your weekends may now be filled with trips to the home improvement store, spent doing yard work, or doing some other project around your house.
Before becoming a homeowner, you probably never gave a lot of thought to the windows in a home. A window was just a window. It lets in light and you can open it to let in some fresh air. But now that you own a home, you may be looking at windows in a whole new way. For example, you might be wondering how much your old, single-pane windows are contributing to your high energy bills. The answer: a lot!
Why Are Single-Pane Windows So Bad at Keeping Out Heat and Cold?
Admittedly, we don’t have a lot of extreme weather in the San Diego area, but when we do get hot days or cold nights, you don’t want the inside of your home to feel them. You still want your home to maintain a comfortable temperature, despite the temperatures outside.
If your home has single-pane windows, they are doing very little to keep out the heat and cold. Stand next to a window that faces the sun on a hot day, and you’ll definitely feel the heat coming through! This is because single-pane windows are missing two critical elements that can help keep out the heat: insulation and reflection.
A single pane of glass has almost no insulating properties. When the sun shines on a standard pane of window glass, it absorbs the heat, and then almost instantly radiates it into your home.
In addition, most single-pane windows have no special coatings to help reflect the sun’s infrared light. This is because, if these coatings were to be placed on the single pane of glass, they would wear off quickly due to being exposed to dust and the chemicals and materials used to clean glass.
How Modern, Dual-Pane Replacement Windows in San Diego Solve the Problem
The high-quality, dual-pane replacement windows we sell at BM Windows solve both of the issues that make single-pane windows so inefficient.
First of all, the space in between the two panes of glass in a dual-pane window provides a buffer that helps slow down the transfer of heat and cold from the outside to the inside of a home. If you want to slow down the transfer even more, you can choose to have a special gas, such as Argon, pumped into the gap. This is an upgrade on most of the replacement windows sold in San Diego, but many homeowners—especially those in areas that see hotter summer temperatures—find to be worth the added cost.
Secondly, dual-pane windows tend to come with low-emissivity, or Low-E, coatings on the glass. Low-E coatings are microscopic metallic layers that are added to the glass that reflect heat without compromising visibility (at least not enough for most people to notice). Essentially, the sun’s heat bounces off the Low-E coatings and stays outside, rather than making its way into your home.
Low-E coatings work great on dual-pane windows because the delicate coating can be added to the inside-facing surface of the glass on the outer glass pane, and therefore, isn’t exposed to the elements that can damage it over time.
Will Any Dual-Pane, Low-E Replacement Windows Work in San Diego Homes?
There are lots of dual-pane replacement windows with Low-E coatings being sold in San Diego, but they aren’t all created equal! It can be argued that any dual-pane windows will be better than single-pane windows (even those without Low-E glass), but you likely don’t want to go through the process and expense of replacing the windows in your home just to get a slight improvement. You want a noticeable improvement in the comfort level inside your home!
To achieve this, you need to go with a higher-quality brand of replacement windows that is known for using quality materials and industry-leading window technology and construction methods. These are the kinds of windows we sell at BM Windows! We carefully select every brand we choose to sell to our San Diego customers, and we only sell windows that we would proudly install in our own homes.
Even if you buy windows from us without upgrading any of their features and go with the standard options, they will still provide you with excellent insulation! However, if you want to add features like Argon gas in between the two glass panes, or upgrade the coatings on your glass to make them as energy efficient as possible, these are certainly options that are available to you.
Someone from our knowledgeable sales team can explain the upgrade options to you so you can decide for yourself if they make sense for your specific home. Unlike the sales reps at other companies, the BM Windows sales team doesn’t try to “upsell” you on features you don’t really need or want. Instead, they take the time to understand your needs and then make recommendations based on them. For many of our customers, our high-quality windows and their standard features meet all of their needs perfectly!
We would love to meet with you in your San Diego home to tell you more about the replacement windows we sell and the available energy-saving options. Contact our office to set up your appointment today.
