Make your Home Green

New Energy Efficient windows should cut your utility bills

The best energy saving windows currently available are significantly more energy saving than even the existing minimally certified ENERGY STAR windows. Before you consider house window replacements or windows for a new home you should know what makes maximum efficiency windows truly energy efficient and what capabilities should improve your comfort and reduce energy use.

In the following article I outline key features of energy saving windows, the existing ENERGY STAR requirements and the replacement R-5 rules for efficient windows, and how you can make old windows more efficient without replacing them.

The best energy efficient windows reduce household electricity consumption in four ways, the first three of which are directly related to how heat is transferred from one space to another:

• Convection: The exchange of heat through movig air currents
• Radiation: Direct heat radiating off a heat source across space or a transparent surface such as glass
• Conduction: The transfer of heat carried through matter.
• Air flow: When heated air moves, the heat moves too.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about heat transfer both when you’re heating a room, and when you’re cooling it (or trying to keep it as cool as you canwithout air conditioning). The same rules apply to all situations: you would like your high efficiency windows to be as strong a barrier as possible to heat exchange, from the warm side of the glass to the cold side. The only difference is that in winter in cooler climates, you want the heat from the sun to radiate into your house, while you don’t need heat from inside to radiate out; while in hot weather or in hot climates, you don’t want heat from the out-of-doors radiating in.

Air flow is the most important, that is if your existing windows are older than 10-20 years old. Drafts in old windows are the main way in which most houses transfer heat through their windows.

Drafts result from broken putty on old windows, broken glass, cracked wood in wooden window frames, and improperly closed off sliding casements in windows that open. Drafts can also occur in the window framing, and even through the wall around the window.

Convection affects window efficiency as well as your comfort indoors, particularly in winter. If the inside pane is chilly (because too much heat is being conducted to the outdoors across the glass and the gas filler between the glass panes, warm air from the indoors will cool as it hits the glass, and then tends to fall (since warm air rises and cold air falls). The falling cool air draws hotter air in its place, creating a convection loop that lets the window glazing constantly pull heat out of the house, even as youfreeze.

A good way todeal with the convection air flows within your home to turn a wasteful windows into high efficiency windows, is to dress up your windows with window coverings.

Most good quality windows have two to three sections of glazing, with space in between them to act as a barrier against heat transfer. The area between the pane layers is filled either with air or with an inert gas such as argon or krypton.

Conduction through the solid parts of the window is the second way that conduction affects a window’s Energy Savings. A frame manufactured of a single piece of aluminum will transfer a lot of heat from the hot to the cool side, and that is why aluminum window frames tend to build up considerable ice around the frames in cold weather. Energy efficient aluminum window frames require some kind of thermal break between the indoor and outdoor portions of the frame; still, these window frames are still not as energy saving than other kinds. Aluminum frames are definitely less popular than they were a decade or two back because of this, although some more recent wood-cored frames are clad in aluminum. As far as R-values, insulated fiberglass or vinyl windows have the best R-values, followed by regular wood or vinyl windows, with aluminum windows of any type at the back of the pack.

Radiation across the glazing is the third kind of heat exchange that affects a window’s efficiency. Radiation is actually just light. Infrared radiation is long-wave light that you feel directly as heat. Visible light is shorter wave; when intense visible spectrum lightcoming from the sun hits an opaque surface, for instance your body or a chair or carpet inside your house, it turns to longer-wave heat radiation.

How much visible radiation a window lets in is worth considering for a couple of reasons. In climates where keeping a room cool is desired, you want to minimize visible radiation entering your home through your windows, because it turns to heat indoors. In cooler areas where you have the heating on for part of the year, you try to maximize light shining into your home to benefit from free heat from the sun. And you hope to minimize heat passing from the hot to the cool side of the pane in either case.

Manufacturers of the most energy saving windows address infrared heat transfer by applying specialized coatings called Low-E coatings to the glazing. These coatings reflect infrared light back to where it came from, rather than letting it pass across the glass, and that significantly lowers the radiative heat gain you experience from the best energy efficient windows.

You should select low-E windows based on your climate. The three types of climates to look at are heating-dominated, cooling-dominated, and moderate climate with a mixture of heating and cooling. For cold climates you should get a low-E coating that enables maximum solar gain (so you will take advantage of solar heat in cold weather to help heat your home). Such coatings allow up to 71% of heat from the sun through the goazing.

For cooling-dominated climates, you’ll might want a reduced solar gain pane, which reflects most of the radiation back outside- allowing as little as 27% of the heat into the indoors.

For climates between the two, get low-E coatings that provide a moderate heat transfer, in the range of 27% to 71%.

The best energy saving windows therefore combine features to address both of these heat exchange mechanisms: air leakage, conduction, convection, and radiation.

About the Author

Robin Green runs Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com, a website on home energy saving. For further details on better windows see his Energy efficient windows page.

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