Any Triple Pane Windows Advocates Here?

enforcer

OBERON , one last thing expounding on what you said earlier..you said water and alcohol mix..true.

Since oil floats on top of water, you might have thought that oil would float on top of alcohol, too. But the oil sinks to the bottom and the alcohol floats on top of the oil. Even though water and alcohol are both clear liquids, they have different densities. Alcohol floats on top of oil because a drop of alcohol is lighter than a drop of oil the same size.
water and alcoholn are both polar molecules.

Oberon

I would never suggest that window companies shouldn't use a fill chamber. What I meant was that in my opinion (based on some product knowledge) most companies don't.

Air-evacuation chambers are expensive. It is much less expensive to fill in other ways. Some IG spacer systems lend themselves to chamber fill better than others.

There are a few technical reasons to use an argon/nitrogen mixture. Figure a 90% argon fill will net about a 16% improvement in U-factor; half of that will net about 8%. The difference results in U-factor changes in the .02 to .04 range (give or take based on a few other factors). Some folks will suggest that argon at lower concentrations is less likely to permeate thru the seal than is pure argon, so they will argue that the argon/nitrogen mixture is more stable in the airspace versus 90%(+) argon.

Oberon

I hesitated before using the water/alcohol analogy because I figured that someone would add oil (or something similar) in there.

However, my intent was in trying to find a way to describe gas mixtures in an enclosed chamber. Gases mix - or put another way since most of a gas volume is empty space - they "coexist" in the same location - entropy at work - second law of thermodynamics. There is no gas stratification within the IG space. Fill it with 50% argon and 50% nitrogen, everywhere you measure in the space you find the mixture of 50% argon and 50% nitrogen.

And technically, I would have to say that using liquid (alcohol and water) mixing as an analogy to gas "mixing" isn't really correct anyway since liquids fill the space completely - unlike gases which are (again) relatively sparce (when compared to a liquid or a solid) molecules in lots of empty space - I was trying to illustrate what happens in the IG space.

Oh well, suffice to say that gas mixtures do what they are supposed to do when used in the airspace - and they don't separate into separate layers.

UGLi

Only briefly mentioned in this thread so far is the possible reduction of sound transmission through a triple pane window. I install custom home theaters in a railroad town. Triple pane windows with offset glazing using different glass thickness in each pane and different spacing between panes can make a nearby train horn a non-issue in a theater that was previously interrupted by noise every ten minutes.

The biggest problem I have with triple pane windows is that most of them seem to use three identical panes of glass (not considering the coatings) spaced equally. I suppose it's much easier to design and build such a window, but a sound wave will pass through that third identical pane of glass about as readily as the second. I've been looking for cheaper alternatives to Milgard's Quiet Line triple panes, which offer a sound transmission class rating of around 47.

Does anyone know of any good alternatives for me?