Now you can cook and you’re warm, but only on the half of your body that’s facing the Flames we can do better, probably by accident. You discover that you can warm both sides of your body when you sleep by building a short reflecting wall that bounces the heat back at you from behind now we’re getting somewhere, let’s build taller walls and put a roof on it awesome.

Now we have a real shelter for our family to protect us from the wind and weather, but there’s a problem. It’s so dark in here we can do better great idea, punch a door and some windows in our walls, and now life is better than ever.

We have fresh air light, we can see when the neighbors are about to knock and hide. If we need to no one wants a home without doors and windows, but like anything else, they have upsides and downsides, and in order to get better control of your own home’s performance, you need to understand how they influence the invisible Dynamics around you.

Why Are Windows Important?

So, let’s shed some light on it! Windows is a very important conversation and we’re going to get into this when we talk about the sun and the effect of the sun on your house later, but this over here is the energy model.

It’s just a bunch of numbers, but the numbers are very important. So what we have here is the house built inside of the computer environment with these numbers. All we’ve done is build all of the walls and then we’re going to simulate the heat flow through these walls, which is a very simple mathematical calculation, you could actually build an energy model on a piece of paper if you really wanted to.

I do not want to so. I use this software for it, but essentially I’ve got the size of the building the amount of air inside of it, and I have importantly here the windows and doors that appear to be Windows.

Cost Saving Windows?

That’s any door that has a bunch of glass in them and we’ve decided on a triple-pane window with Argon gas inside. So if I hit this button, all of a sudden, I have populated all of the annual energy costs, the annual consumption of heating and electricity that I’m going to use, and I can see that my total costs are about fifteen hundred dollars a year on utilities.

If we use these triple pane windows, if I was to replace all of these with a quadruple pan window, that is twice as insulated. Now it’s 15.41, so I just saved my family 22 dollars a year by buying windows that are twice as insulated and have twice the solar heat gain coefficient.

If I was to step back and see what happens, if I put in a worse window, let’s just for the sake of argument put in the worst window, which is a single pane metal window. So now we rerun this and my fifteen hundred dollars a year turns into 1983. I cost my family another 450 dollars a year in utility bills by using the worst window available. This modeling process is how you determine what you are going to spend money on and how you prioritize what to take seriously in performance.

Protection

Once we settled on the exact insulation value that we were looking for with the windows, there were a bunch of other factors to consider. You can have Windows that don’t move like these they’re called fixed.

That is beneficial for performance because they don’t have a lot of air leakage and water leakage, issues that other windows that do move as this one would. This one is called a casement, so it opens up like a door.

This window is a typical American install, which is known as a nail fin install. So it’s basically got this fin all the way around you slide the window in from the outside and the fin meets up with the building, and then you attach it, as you can see, we’ve got screws here through this Buck, we’re going to tape and seal everything Around the window on both the inside and the outside, with the exception of here at the bottom on the bottom on the outside, we leave this unsealed in any window installed because just in case water gets in, it can come back out where it belongs.

On the outside, we want to limit the number of sun rays that are coming in and heating up this space, but we also opted for the Radiant Barrier, which is the low E coating.

That’s going to prohibit heat from bleeding out through this window at night. We know from the energy model that this is going to be good enough to give us the performance that we’re looking for. Remember, you’re always trying to tune not just the enclosure to itself which we’re going to get into in the next episode, but we’re trying to tune the enclosure to the heating and cooling and drying and ventilation machines that we’re going to install in this.

The engines which we’re going to get into in later episodes, don’t let anybody just rush you into. Oh here’s what you want. Everybody buys this one, it’s what’s good, it’s the same as going into a restaurant and saying what’s good here and they say well.

You want special stuff that most other people are not after so look into the options again, we’re looking at installation value, we’re looking at what the sun can do coming in what heat will be able to leave going through what the functionality of the window is, which way it opens if it opens at all – and all of that goes into your decision making for these windows and remember that a giant glass door is a window.

That’s just humongous, so you want to make the same exact decisions in that case.