A number of ways that you could already treat existing glazing, to improve it,
one is a heat shrink film that kind of sticks onto the joinery. It's okay,
you know, performance can be alright but it's very difficult to clean and it's
pretty much a temporary solution. Quite good if you're renting a place, you know,
and you want to do that - you're going to rent it for a few years so that's quite a good
solution for that; but for my own home and for many of our clients that's not
really how they want to go. Another possibility is in some cases you
can take out the glass and put in a double glazed unit in its place. What
happens with that is, invariably, you get a very very narrow double glazed unit.
And, of course, not all double glazing is born the same - so it really depends the
performance of it depends, to a very large extent, on the space between
the two surfaces; and when you get to a very small space in order to fit it to the
existing frame, really the performance is a bit limited. And many of the people
providing that solution never actually state what the solution - what the performance
of their solution is. So that's often not a very good solution
from a performance point of view. The next thing of course is that you can
just replace the whole unit - all your windows and doors - with double glazed ones. Purpose-made double glazed ones.
And from a performance point of view that's great, but, it's very expensive,
it's very wasteful of the existing joinery, and also you've got the added
risk of a builder working in your home. You know, is he gonna do the right thing,
is you're gonna seal around the window units before putting the architraves on,
is he going to make good the walls, you know, then you've got decorating to do as
well - so it's a much bigger process with more risk involved. People often ask me
about the thickness of glass. Okay, so - well this glass is very thin so it
can't be very thermally effective; or this glass it's thick, its laminated, so it's
much more thermally effective. The truth is that with glass, with single glazing, the
only performance you get from that is a little thin layer of air that clings to
each surface. So you can see from that, whether the glass is very thin or
whether it's thicker, you still just get a little bit of air on each side; and
so its thickness as a glass, goes towards human impact safety, and wind
loading, but it does not really go towards thermal performance. So that's
one of the greatest myths that most people have about glazing. The other one
is, with double glazing, is it going to be good in the sun. And the answer is, no
glass is going to work well in the summertime in the sun, okay. In the winter
time, if you've got a heating environment like most of Victoria does, you want the
sun coming through. And the thing about double glazing is, if it's clear glass
that's perfect - it's still going to let 95% of the sun straight through, and it's
warm. So that's just brilliant. But in the summertime, you know, if you've got single
glazing you have to shade it, and if you've got double glazing, you have to
shade it.
So ecoGlaze is a way of providing the benefits of double glazing to existing
windows and doors, without the need to replace anything. It works by creating a
still airspace between the existing glass and the ecoGlaze panel. And
that's what provides the double glazing performance. So we've got in a one
system for fixed glazing - that is glazing that doesn't open; we've got another system
for most hinged applications like doors and awning windows; and we've got another
system for sliding applications like sash windows and sliding doors. And in
that way we've been able to address all those issues. We think it looks great,
it does perform well, and, you know, all your windows and doors work just as they
did before. You don't have to take things on and off to operate your windows.