RE: [GBlist] Re: Wood frame windows with high-perf glazing?

[Gilbert Midonnet <gilbert.midonnet@btec.com>]

Title: RE: [GBlist] Re: Wood frame windows with high-perf glazing?

I would love to figure out how you guestimated a savings of 10M BTU/YR with Hurd.

Nonetheless, assuming your figures are correct, going from Anderson to Hurd is not a good investment. (140,000 BTU/gal * 80%= 112,000 BTU/gal) Say 100,000 usable BTU/gal, that's 100 gallons of oil/year. At $1.50/gal that's a savings of $150/year.

It will take at least 50 years (assuming 30) to pay that back. Longer than the lifespan of the window.

aarrg -- not good, not good at all.

Let's forget personal investment, how does it play globally.

Let's take the savings (100 gallons of oil or 10M BTU/year) and multiply it by 1,000,000 homes and we see that with one million homes upgrading from Anderson to Hurd the US would save 100 million  gallons / year or 10 billion BTU / year.

What percentage is that of the total?

The US uses approx 17 million barrels of oil / day and about 100 quadrillion BTU / year.

At 42 gallons / barrel the US consumes 714 million gallons / day or 260,610 million / year.

By converting from Anderson to Hurd we save 3.5 hours of oil consumption / year, or 1/100,000 of the energy used / year (5 minutes worth).

I propose that the money would be better spent if the money spent on the windows was used to buy "waste" land and leaving it undeveloped.

Let's see say 20 - 40 windows / house. Savings at about $150 / window that's $3-6,000/house or 3-6 billion dollars for the United States.

That can buy an awful lot of land in Indonesia, Costa Rica, Brazil, or if you prefer the US: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah.

At $100/acre that's 30-60 million acres or 47-94,000 square miles. As a point of comparison England is approx. 50,000 square miles.

yours in geekdom,

gilbert midonnet

(I hope the above is accurate and understandable)

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Nolan [mailto:jnolan@ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us]
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 11:04 PM
To: greenbuilding@crest.org
Subject: [GBlist] Re: Wood frame windows with high-perf glazing?

A summary of my window search results, FWIW:

The best performing (in our cold cloudy upstate NY climate) wood-framed
window I could find was from Hurd (<http://www.hurd.com>). Their Insol-8
glazing system uses 2 sheets of lightweight Heat Mirror film between the 2
panes of glass, giving 3 argon-filled spaces (effectively a quad-pane
window). I used the free RESFEN software to compare performance in a model
similar to our house plan. The Hurd Insol-8 casements have u values around
0.18, and SHGC of 0.38 (whole unit R5.5).

I'm waiting on a quote for Andersen dual-pane with low-e & argon, but I can
guesstimate that the Hurds are about 40-50% more expensive (really an
apples to oranges comparison).

more info on Heat Mirror(tm):
<http://www.southwall.com/products/hm.html>

Also looked seriously at Marvin triple-pane with krypton fill, but their
numbers were worse (u=.25  SHGC=.39), and they were about 40% more $$ than
Hurd, and that was using a hardcoat low-e that is not even listed in their
catalogs (which makes me nervous).

It's hard to estimate accurately with just RESFEN, but it seems that our
energy losses should be cut by at least 10MBTU/yr by using Hurd Insol-8
instead of the Andersen duals on our 1800sf 2-story home. Maybe hard to
justify as a financial investment, but sounds good to me in ecological &
comfort terms.

Feedback welcome.

---
Joe Nolan
<http://www.ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us/>

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