The timber industry is very active with spin about other materials but it would be best to stick with the facts.

PVC-U, UPVC or PVC does not give off fumes nor does it leach into the ground whether buried or not. PVC-U is a particularly inert material. Once it is manufactured into profile it lasts, and lasts, and lasts. Many of the windows installed in the 1980s by Local Authorities are being replaced with double glazed frames because they were single glazed to save money. Others are being replaced and upgraded so they are more secure or have better insulation, or because the hardware breaks down and is obsolete. But the PVC-U itself just goes on and on.

Early estimates of its lifetime have had to be revised upwards. PVC-U windows will clearly last 35 years with ease, but the material itself looks good for 70 years or more. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if, like concrete, it lasted much longer. The surface gets grubby and fades after a time, but that’s it. It resists burning and self extinguishes in fire. It doesn’t melt in normal fires. When it does burn, at very high temperatures, and long after timber has burned to a crisp, it does give off some fumes. All materials do. Timber for example gives off far more noxious dioxins than PVC-U which gives off just a trace.

The more we recycle the better. It’s just good house keeping. It’s a waste if we don’t, but buried PVC-U is not a hazard or danger to health.

Now if you are concerned about easily leached materials from the surface of window frames in landfill, consider the nasty materials from the coatings of old timber frames. Like PVC-U windows, timber windows can be recycled. They could be dismantled but you try scraping away the paint and breaking down the window into components. Most timber windows aren’t recycled as you can see from the contents of skips all around the country. Most replaced windows going into landfill are not PVC-U, they are timber. If you want to lie awake worried about window materials leaching into our water supplies, worry about old timber windows.

Martin Randall
Fighting Back With Facts
http://www.fightingbackwithfacts.com

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

I received the following comment on the site:

There’s two websites out there where consumers can find information about the environmental credentials of uPVC:

PVCAware.org

Fighting Back With Facts

If you haven’t already linked your website to these websites, then you should consider doing so. I’ve already got a banner link to PVCAware on RCG, and I’ll be adding a banner link to Fighting Back With Facts soon. If more companies in our industry link to these sites, then more consumers will read the content. The sites will also improve in the search engine rankings.

I’m also going to get the environmental message across more on my Conservatory Outlet website. If we work together on this we can fight back with facts.