Everest Double Glazing - the price isn't right!

There was an interesting thread over on the selfbuild list last week about someone getting Everest in for a quotation for new glazing.

Had Everest round to quote on windows for our upcoming project. I 
thought they would be expensive, but was in for a shock when he came up 
with £45k for 12 windows, 3 double doors, 2 standard doors and a front 
door with side light! The quote is for UPVC with a lifetime guarantee 
for double glazing, U-value 1.2 and light oak finish. The front door 
is hardwood, all the windows look very good quality and it includes 
fitting. 2 garage doors added another £8600 to the price.

I pointed out that was 1/3 of our budget for the whole house build and 
he seamed to forget all about the sales pitch! I also showed him the 
prices in the self build bible for a similar number of doors and 
windows for £7k, again he was stuck for words.

Before I pushed him out the door he had knocked off 28% for bulk order, 
10% for ordering straight away and after a phonecall to the boss 
another 20% if they can use the house for advertising purposes. 
Knocking off the front and garage doors that we didn’t like much anyway 
left a best price of £20k for 12 windows and 5 doors (inc fitting). I 
was budgeting to get all of them (including oak front door and garage 
doors) for £15k max. Am I in the wrong ball park?

Must say my heart always goes into my mouth when I read that someone is using my book for pricing purposes, especially when there is a huge discrepancy between quoted prices and what I’ve suggested that the going rate actually is. I needn’t have worried. Two replies came back thus:

Your instinct is right. Everest is a very expensive way to go and not really
suited to a new build. As an example, we got 15 assorted (softwood) windows,
with glazing (all double, toughened, Pilkington K and Argo-filled) from
Travis Perkins for £2000. Had to fit the glass into the frames ourselves
which added a few hundred pounds. OK, that was a cheap 'n cheerful answer
(which suits me well enough) but a VERY far cry from - what did you say? -
£45,000!!!


and

'get three quotes for anything significant, and six for windows ... 
unless you know what a good price is !

'we paid roughly £10k for six French windows, one very large 
window, one corner window, another window, and two small windows ... 
a few years ago ... toughened & silvered, double glazed, with 
internal glazing bars, fitted ...


Joinery is one of the more complex parts of a build to quote for but what I have been trying to do over the past few years is to reduce the price down to a square metre rate. It’s not perfect because some elements, particularly the smaller pieces, are much more expensive on a metre basis than larger ones. But given that most houses consist of a mix of small windows, large windows and largeish doors, it tends to work out
 reasonably well over a whole house. What people don’t do, of course, which would be very helpful, is to state how much joinery they are buying in square metres. Instead you get long lists — effectively unmeasured joinery schedules — which you can merely hazard a guess at. As a very rough guide, you can guess that the area of joinery is going to be around 20% of your internal floor area, so if you don’t have a joinery schedule to hand, this is a good place to start.

The costs of joinery are also very variable depending partly on the quality but also on how they are finished and fitted. Is the glazing being purchased separately? Is fitting included in the cost? What I found on my last trawl through joinery costs is that prices varied from as little as £80/m2 for unglazed, unpainted softwood frames through to as much as £400/m2 for pre-finished upmarket glazing from the likes of Rationel and Velfac. A basic uPVC system, of the kind that Everest turn out, should be costing no more than £150- £200/m2. My guess is that the house in question has around 40m2 of joinery (not atypical on a selfbuild these days) and that the Everest rep was pitching initially at over £1,000/m2 and ended up down at around £400-£500/m2 mark, still way more than the prices of far better alternatives.

Photovoltaic glass

“When a journalist talks about PV cells, we know we are dealing with an amateur.” Jerry Stokes, President of Suntech Europe, drops this little admonition on me as he talks me over their installation at the Kingspan (Code Level 6) Lighthouse at Offsite 2007 (see previous post). As I have already used PV cells several times in the conversation so far, he has already pencilled me in as a numbskull. I reflect on the number of times I have casually written about PV cells over the years. Oh well, you live and learn. Apparently the photovoltaic cells are the tiny little bits that make up the modules, arrays or panels (all of which are OK to refer to) but on their own are not very useful. You need thousands of cells to make a module. I will know next time.

Suntech is an interesting company. It was started in China in 2001 by Shi Zhengrong, a solar engineer. It’s seen explosive growth, mainly supplying the German photovoltaic boom, and is now listed on the NYSE with a valuation of around $5.5billion. How many six-year-old companies have done that in Britain? (Don’t know, but expect answer to be none). Shi, who owns 40% of the company, is now one of the richest men in mainland China. All from making photovoltaics.

At the Offsite exhibition last week, Suntech were showing off a Japanese PV system called Photovol Glass which is the first translucent photovoltaic skin I have seen. It can be used as a substitute for glass in applications like glazed facades and roofs. As well as generating electricity, it cuts out heat transfer and UV radiation, but admits around 10% of daylight, thus making it suitable for large glazed facades or roof panels. Money wasn’t mentioned in my conversation with Stokes, so I can only assume that it costs rather more than traditional PV, which is hardly well-known for being cheap in the first place, but if it rolls out as Suntech hope, it could pave the way for one day becoming a replacement for standard glass. Or maybe not. What does an amateur like me really know about this stuff?

It's curtains

Chris Hamlin writes:

Hi Mark
After reading your blogs and general ranting on the stupidity of HIPS, I still have never seen anything mentioned on the efficiency on curtains as an insulating material. On our old cottage, with part double-glazing, part older character windows, we have home-made blinds and combined with curtains which are lined and inter-lined. I would suggest the rating must be equal to or better than a modern double glazed window. The house can warm up more during the day through the single sheet of glass, and then retain that heat when the blinds and curtains are closed after sunset.

Also the house has 2ft wide solid wall construction. Might this be more or less efficient than cavity wall + insulation? Does anyone know?

I'd like to see government helicopters mapping the city at night with their heat photographing cameras and targeting the few really bad leaking buildings (and cannabis dryers!) directly and leaving the rest of us alone, instead of stimulating another raft of inspectors.


Mark reckons:

Some interesting points, Chris.

I still have never seen anything mentioned on the efficiency on curtains as an insulating material

I suspect that's because no one has ever measured them. I think a lot would depend on the degree of draft-proofing but in theory a single sheet of glass should admit more heat during the day and a thick drape would act something like a second sheet of glass at night. But equal to, or better than? Who could say?

Also the house has 2ft wide solid wall construction. Might this be more or less efficient than cavity wall + insulation?

Measurements have been taken on solid wall materials. Generally solid stone performs very poorly, from a conduction point of view. You need something like a 3ft to 4ft thickness to achieve the equivalence of a modern cavity wall. And if it gets wet, it's almost useless.

I'd like to see government helicopters mapping the city at night with their heat photographing cameras and targeting the few really bad leaking buildings (and cannabis dryers!) directly and leaving the rest of us alone, instead of stimulating another raft of inspectors.

Well that would be really popular, wouldn't it! Can you imagine getting a heating ticket from a flying thermographic camera! Maybe one day soon, they'll be able to do it from satellites.

Window Energy Ratings

If you want a good example of just how complex low-energy housebuilding can be, take a peek at window ratings. Glazing is unique in this environment in that heat can flow both ways through it. Whilst at night, heat radiates out through the glazing, during the day and particularly when it’s sunny, substantial amounts of heat passes into the house. Over the course of a year, a south-facing window is often a net energy contributor. Because of this, the traditional way of measuring energy efficiency, the U-value, becomes just a little shabby when dealing with glazed areas, because it only deals with heat loss.

Now a few years back, some bright spark had the idea of introducing an energy-rating scheme for windows, just like the ones you see on fridges and washing machines, ranging from A (excellent) to G (not so excellent). They have been running schemes like this in North America, Australia and New Zealand but Europe has been slower to adopt. However, at long last it has got underway and there is now a body known as the British Fenestration Registration Council (BFRC) that has got the ball rolling in the UK.

The window rating system looks at three aspects of performance.
• The U value (or heat loss) of the window assembly
• The g value, or solar gain
• The L value, or air leakage of the assembly

Now the g value bit is interesting because the amount of heat admitted into the house obviously depends on the orientation of the window. A south facing window will absorb far more energy than a north facing one. How can you reduce this to a single value? I think they fudge this and assume it’s east or west facing, because they have to come up with a constant in order to make a comparison. Interestingly, the very low U values windows (which are sometimes triple glazed) tend to score rather poorly on the g values and it is felt there may come a point where an ultra low U value fails to make any appreciable difference in heat loss terms. Hell, I warned you it was complex.

Anyway, by hook or by crook, the BFRC have come up with a system that supposedly takes all of this into account (you can read more about it on their website if you are so inclined) and reduces all this conflicting data into just seven categories.

The very best windows, the A rated ones, are reckoned to be net heat contributors over the course of a heating season without having to be mounted in the south face of the house. When the BFRC originally set up the scheme, they didn’t anticipate there being many A rated windows, at least not for many years but the scheme has only been running 18 months and already there are loads of As, so much so that it’s beginning to resemble the A level results from Jade Goody’s comprehensive. The question is now arising as to whether the standards have been set too low.

As of time of writing, the accredited casement windows rate as follows:
• 24 A rated (of which just one is timber, all the rest being uPVC)
• 41 B rated (2 timber, the rest uPVC)
• 67 C rates (2 timber, 1 aluminium…)
• 22 D rated (3 timber, 1 aluminium…)
• 12 E rated (1 timber, 3 aluminium…)
• 0 F rated
• 0 G rated

Sliding sash windows are dealt with in a separate category and thus far only one firm, Masterframe, have bothered to submit their products for testing and their best rating is a C. It is not thought that it will ever be possible for a sliding sash to get an A rating, because of the design constraints.

Now whilst this haul represents a fair number of windows that have been submitted to this entirely voluntary scheme, it does make you wonder whether there is much point having an F or a G rating. This is hardly going to be a selling point for a window, especially as the building regulations, revised in 2006, call for minimum rating of D on new work or E on replacement windows. If an F rating is a fail, what is the purpose of having a G rating?

Looks like the scheme itself will have to be re-rated. Anyone for an A* or even an A***?

The Shutters of Old Nice

Nice is famous for its shutters. They form an integral part of the streetscape in the old parts of town, as they do across much of southern France, but in Nice the intensity of the Mediterranean light plus the combination of the pastel shutter shades with the earthy wall colours makes for a quite stunning spectacle. Consequently, the shutters appear on the cover of guidebooks and in countless postcards and have become icons in their own right.

The shutters aren’t just for show. They are immensely practical and are a good example of what we once called appropriate technology, essentially a low-tech solution to a problem, in this instance how to keep cool in a hot climate. The Brinkleys have just spent a week in the apartment I part-own in Nice and, once we mastered just how to get the best out of the shutters, the rooms stayed cool and fresh all day and all night, despite the daytime temperatures peaking in the 30s.

The apartment has a high-tech Daikin air conditioning system and for the first couple of days we played with it incessantly, trying to get it to work perfectly. But air conditioning can be, and often is, frustrating to live with. To get it to work well, you have to close all the windows, but if you then leave it on for a long time, it is easy for the air temperature to drop too low. If you leave it on in your bedroom whilst you sleep, you risk waking up two hours later freezing cold. Even if you manage to get the temperature right — and there are temperature adjustments you can make on the handsets — it is still just a little too noisy to make sleeping easy and, additionally, the air quality isn’t that great because its being recirculated. You keep wanting to throw the windows open to get some fresh air, but of course that defeats the logic of air conditioning.

By Day Three, we had worked out how to get comfortable at night without any air conditioning, just by using the shutters. The shutters have three modes, as illustrated by my photo here, taken from the rear of the apartment.

• Open: lets the light flood in. This also harvests solar energy and heats the apartment in spring and autumn. In the heat of August, this didn’t concern us.
• Closed: keeps the sun out in the heat of the day, provides privacy and blocks out enough light to enable sleep. In addition, a metal hook locks the shutters into the closed position and thus provides security.
• Closed but with bottom flap open: keeps the hot sun out during the day but maximises ventilation.

The trick we learned was to open all the windows and close all the shutters during the night. Additionally, the internal doors had to be left open. This created a controlled flow of air from front to back, enough to keep the apartment cool and fresh throughout the night. No night sweats and no freezing butts, just hours of uninterrupted sleep. In the morning, the fresh bread smells from the bakery downstairs wafted up into the apartment. Bliss.

I can’t say for sure, but I believe that most of the older Nice apartments have been built this way, designed to use the shutters to control ventilation in this fashion. My guess is that this natural form of air conditioning would suffice in all but the most extreme heat waves.

Masterframe sash windows

Sometime in 2002, I was out taking photos for a forthcoming edition of The Housebuilder's Bible when I chanced upon a Bellway estate taking shape in Burwell, Cambs. The picture is on p165 of the current edition, No 6. The estate is done out in very trad styling and most of the elevations use sash windows. What troubled me was that I assumed these sash windows were timber but on closer inspection I reckoned that they might be uPVC. So I took a closer look at one…in truth I wasn’t really sure what they were made of. I was stumped. As someone who makes a living out of knowing about building homes, I felt ever so slightly humiliated and was glad there was no one there to share my discomfort.

I had stumbled across the product of Masterframe, a very unusual window company based in Witham in Essex. The windows were uPVC but the uPVC itself has been through a process called foiling, a rough veneering, which gives the surface the feel and character of painted timber. I am not alone in my confusion. It’s very convincing and it fools a lot of people. Planning officers who are instructed from their first day at planning school that it’s “timber good, uPVC bad” have been known to have to eat humble pie after they couldn’t tell the difference.

On Tuesday this week, I got to visit Masterframe as guest of their owner Alan Burgess (pictured here). He is a very affable and enthusiastic guy who has been working with windows all his life. Something of a reluctant entrepreneur, he only started Masterframe because he had seen a brilliant example of a uPVC sliding sash window which no one wanted to put into production. He became convinced that there was a market for such a product and so began his quest to make the perfect sliding sash window – out of plastic.

Masterframe now produce several hundred sash windows a week. They don’t install; they are mostly selling to installers, including some of the big boys like Anglian. Much of their product goes into the replacement replacement market. That is to say houses where the original boxed sash windows have been pulled out and replaced by aluminium or uPVC casements which are now past their sell-by-date. You can see the architectural devastation brought about by the replacement window market on virtually every street in the UK where the housing stock is more than 30 years old. For many people, the culprit is uPVC, but Alan Burgess never believed that there was anything inherently wrong with the material and has gone on to show that it’s possible to create or maintain authentic British styles whilst using new materials.

If you want to know more, take a closer look at their website. There is a fascinating section entitled Glossary of Terms, broken down into 20 pages, which looks at the detailing that goes into their product, right down to the choice of the brush seal weather stripping and the placing of foam baffles. Every time an issue or a problem arises, they use it to improve the design. The attention to detail reminded me of one or two German businesses that I know of, but the desire to re-engineer a traditional product such as a sash window would seem to me to be something you might expect from the Americans. It makes Masterframe a difficult company to pigeonhole but, in turn, Masterframe make a mockery of the assumption that most of us Brits have, namely that we are hopeless at manufacturing.

No More Door Closers - Yippee

We building regs watchers are well used to consultation documents spewing out of the ODPM. Building control these days is in a state of permanent flux and it is almost impossible for professionals to keep up with all the changes and amendments. Part B deals with Fire Safety and it’s constantly being tinkered with but now we have a new consultation paper in front of us, in effect a full-blown rewrite. This morning I checked into the ODPM website to see what the action was. It’s there, under Consultation Documents; Part B has been separated into two sections, one for dwellings, the other for everything else. So far so good: my interest is dwellings, so that might be half my work done. But then I download Part B consultation for dwellings and find that it’s 236 pages long. Oh, my Gawd.

Already I can feel my eyelids getting heavy at the thought of trying to digest any of this. But, I had been alerted in the press that there was an interesting nugget in here and, after a bit of digging around, I found it on p203.

"The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is minded to remove the need for self-closing devices within
dwellings. This is because they can present a hazard to children; they can
interfere with the day-to-day convenience of the occupants and many of
our stakeholders tell us they are often disabled soon after occupation. The
fire safety benefits of closing doors, particularly at night, remain and it is
proposed to reinforce this message through national and local Community
Fire Safety programmes (see www.firekills.gov.uk) and other fire safety
initiatives. We would therefore particularly welcome consultees’ views on this particular proposal."

No more door closers! Yippee! That’s my view, ODPM.

What a pain in the arse they have been. I well remember back in my loft-converting days in the 1980s that we carried Perko door closers (pictured at the top of this blog) in our tool kits. They were a complete bugger to fit and, if adjusted over-strongly, they would snap your hand off when they door slammed shut. They would be fitted into the designated fire doors until the building inspector finalled; and then they were whipped off, by order of the client. My guess is that I fitted the same Perkos about six times before some Muppet decided they actually wanted to keep them.

What the other 235.5 pages have in them, I have no idea. But this one proposal certainly meets with my approval. Mark Brinkley