Winter doesn’t officially start until Saturday, but you wouldn’t know that from looking around these parts. A pair of back to back powerhouse storms dumped a lot of snow all throughout the Northeast.
It’s not just snowy, it’s cold. Many homeowners are cranking up the heat in an effort to stay warm. That means heating bills are going up, up, up — especially as fuel prices continue to escalate.
There are three factors to any home heating bill. There’s the cost of the energy used to heat your home. There’s the temperature outside, determining how often and how much you’ll need to heat your home to stay comfortable. Then there’s the integrity of your home, determining how much cold air is coming in and how much warmed air is leaking out.
Obviously, the first two factors are outside of our control. None of us can influence either the cost of energy nor the weather. However, the energy efficiency of our homes is within our control, and that’s where home replacement windows come into play.
Vinyl home replacement windows, from manufacturers such as Alside, Harvey, Pella, and Champion, offer superior energy efficiency. Triple pane glass, low E coatings, insulated gas chambers, solid vinyl frames, superior construction and other features of superior home replacement windows help address the ways heat is lost from the home.
There are four ways that heat can be lost from the home: conduction, convection, radiation and air leakage.
Conduction is the movement of heat through a solid surface. For an example, look at a pan on your kitchen stove. That pan becomes hot because heat from the burner is conducted through the metal the pan is made of. The same holds true for glass — heat can move from one side of the glass (the interior of your home) to another (outside) Triple pane glass windows, by creating multiple surfaces and insulating gas pockets between the solid surfaces, reduce conduction tremendously.
Triple pane glass also helps reduce heat loss that occurs via convection: heat loss that occurs due to the movement of air.
Heat loss due to radiation can be dramatically reduced by the use of low E coatings. These thin, metallic coatings are applied to the directly to the window glass. They’re invisible, so you still get full enjoyment of your window — yet valuable heat energy is retained within the house. In the summer, low E coatings help cool air stay in while keeping the hot summer sun outside.
Air leakage is the last factor, and this is one factor where modern home replacement windows definitely excel over their earlier counterparts. Improved construction techniques, including seals, spacers, and frame materials, make today’s vinyl home replacement windows a superb choice to reduce air leakage. Older windows, especially single pane windows, are notorious for their air leakage rates — it’s possible to lose almost half of your home’s heat through old windows! Improve the situation with vinyl home replacement windows today!