Renegade Conservatory Guy

Guest post from Martin Randall – Crystal Direct

As we have come to expect from English Heritage, the article ‘Meet the building regs: Yes we can’ (Bullseye, issue 12) smuggled in a lot of prejudice and opinion as fact. It was like stepping back in time.

I’ll leave the BFRC, systems companies and dedicated sliding sash companies like Masterframe to put English Heritage right on its technical inaccuracies. But the idea that heavy curtains and ugly, space-hogging secondary glazing will improve energy saving enough to match double glazing and achieve a C-rating seems highly improbable. If you have to keep the original windows then yes, you’ll have to use every trick in the book including secondary glazing, roller blinds, heavy curtains and extra seals to paper over the cracks and gaps and cut down on draughts.

And on a good day, maybe you can reduce the whistling of the wind and cut down on heat leakage. But it isn’t much fun living in artificial light behind a barricade of secondary glazing, roller blinds and heavy curtains. It says that a combination of these methods will upgrade most sash windows to meet building regulations. Would that be the equivalent of an A, B or C window energy rating, or is it a G?

I fully support the idea of protecting our heritage and I think wood is great for floors and stairs and furniture. But in British weather it’s not an ideal material for window frames.

Georgian sashes lasted a long time because the timber was seasoned, and they were well made. But, Georgian houses also set the windows back in a rebate so they were protected from the weather. And labour was cheap and plentiful, so they could afford to repaint and repair at frequent intervals.

If not well maintained and protected against the weather, timber rots and degrades quickly, particularly in coastal regions. That’s a fact. The RCG Blog has an excellent set of photographs to remind us, showing what happens to windows that haven’t been maintained. I recommend everyone to visit the site and see what weather does to wood. The same RCG photographs are on the Fighting Back with Facts website.

Many home owners have not experienced life with timber windows. In most very new houses with double glazed timber windows the frames are now built to a higher spec and they will last – provided you maintain them. But anyone who lived in a house with timber windows built between 1980 and 2000 knows that timber doesn’t last. Many failed catastrophically in five to seven years. Yes, you do get badly installed PVC-U windows, and ones with cheap hardware and poor designs to meet a price, but in general PVC-U windows look good and last many years.

Georgian builders used the most modern materials and products that were available at the time. Had modern PVC-U windows been available they would have used them.

Mr Nicholas comments that unlike PVC-U, timber windows ‘can be repaired easily and be made to look brand new again with just a simple coat of paint’. Given their vulnerability to the weather, they have to, although I think he is forgetting the filler, the primer and undercoat and the second coat of gloss if you want them to last. Maintaining timber windows beyond the first few years is a labour of love.

Mr Nicholas refers to energy saving measures as a ‘fad’. I disagree. Surely it pays to avoid waste, in energy as in other things? Saving the energy lost through windows has a far greater impact than switching to energy saving light bulbs and other token gestures. And the idea of renewable energy is not to get us off the hook so we can squander it.

English Heritage does much good, but heavy curtains are not the answer. If they were, would the rest of the world have invested so much money and effort in seeking ways to save expensive energy?

Yours sincerely
Martin Randall
Chairman, Crystal Direct and Founder of Fighting Back With Facts