Farley Window Quality?

dougchips

If surface #1 is the exterior
and surface #2 is the interior, is surface #3 on top of surface #2?

If the glass forms on the liquid tin how can surface #2 also be a tin surface unless you poured the glass on the tin and more tin on top?

If the tin side is surface one, would the sun clean coating make a big difference? The newer glass is so smooth it does not have a bumpy (technical term) surface for particles to collect.

Guessing at what you do for a living....you know to much to sell windows......maybe you sell glass to window companies?

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To get the best replacement windows, or sun rooms contact the replacement windows experts at FHI Vinyl Window Company.

Oberon

Consider a typical IG unit - two lites of glass separated by a spacer.

The exterior of the exterior (as you said) is surface #1. The interior of that lite is surface #2. The other lite then has surface #3 and #4 - with #4 being the surface that is actually exposed inside the home.

In a heating dominated climate, the primary reason for placing the LowE coating on the #3 surface of the IGU is to allow for solar heat gain in the winter...which brings us to High Solar Heat Gain (or HSHG) coatings and Low Solar Heat Gain (or LSHG) coatings.

The Ti-AC 40 coating is a LSHG product - as is standard LowE2 and LowE3 - meaning that these coatings block near infrared and far infrared energy (and probably mid-range infrared also, but I have never seen a specific study confirming that part of the equation).

What does that mean? Well, all LowE coatings are designed to block far infrared - or longwave infrared - energy. This is the range that includes typical household heat - no matter how produced.

Near, or shortwave, infrared translates into direct solar heat gain. This is heat that you would like to block in summer and pass in winter - if you live in a heating dominated climate. A typical hardcoat ,or a single-silver layer softcoat, coating works in this application since both types of coatings block the far infrared energy - thus keeping winter heat indoors - but neither is particularly effective at blocking shortwave infrared - thus "allowing" solar heat access to the home - winter or summer.

Placing this type of coating on surface #3 maximizes the level of solar heat gain thru the IG unit which is an advantage in winter and a disadvantage in summer. Again, these are High Solar Heat Gain products.

A Low Solar Heat Gain product is designed to block both near and far infrared energy. It will keep heat - including direct solar gain - out of you home in both summer and winter. These are typically softcoat LowE coatings.

LowE2, LowE3, and Ti-AC 40 are all examples of this type of coating - sometimes called spectrally selective coatings.

These coatings are placed on surface two to maximize effectiveness against direct solar gain by blocking the solar heat before it can pass into the airspace in the IG unit.

In the float glass process, the molten glass literally floats on a bath of molten tin. When the (primarily) tin pyrolytic coating is applied, it is applied while the glass is in the tin bath by "showering" the upper (or air) surface of the glass with the coating. So, the glass is bathing and showering (be it in molten tin) at the same time; thus producing tin coats on both sides of the lite. The top "coating" is the LowE and the bottom coating is a simple by-product of the float process.

The addition of the sun clean coating makes the glass really smooth. If you look at an electron microscope image of the surface of glass you see tiny mountain ranges all across that surface - technically called bumpy.

One of the attributes of the sun-clean-type coating is that it fills in those bumps and makes the face of the glass smoother than it was before the coating was applied - so that the water molecules have nothing to grab on to - so that they simply sheet off the glass rather than bead up on the surface.

And finally - not a sales or marketing guy - don't sell anything. I do work with research and product development folks; primarily in areas pertaining to code compliance and certification. Hopefully, I assist them as they develop whatever product it is that they are developing, a reality.

Window Watcher

After a recent purchase and installation of replacement Farley Windows, I have seen that they allow water to leak into the house. If water leaks air may leak, too. Farley Windows seems to be content that it's OK for their new windows to leak water due to the poor design of the window drainage mechanism. Maybe, Farley Windows of today is not what it used to be.