Much of this book has been concerned with controlling humidity in the house. A double-glazed window is a perfect alarm system to warn us of dangerous humidity conditions. A double-glazed window has just enough thermal insulation to allow comfort in the house without producing condensation on th...
Air leaks through the moving parts of windows accounts for as much as 14 per cent of the heat loss in a typical Canadian house. Picking the right kind of windows can certainly help:-- Fixed windows with no moving parts can be completely sealed. -- Fixed window panes with small moveable section...
Yes. Too many windows facing south in an ordinary house can cause over heating. A window area on the south side of not more than 6 per cent of the total floor space of your house (counting a heated basement) should cause no problems. More than that and you have created half a solar house -...
Roland wants to know how to get curtain rods to hold better in drywall.A screw driven directly into drywall will not hold at all, unless it is driven into wood behind the drywall. If the wall is hollow where you want to drive the screw you must use some kind of drywall fastener or fastener syste...
Al from Vernon, BC nails a 2x4 to the top of his extension ladder to be able to span across windows. We made a version of this setup that would work for any long ladder -- a 2x4 on the wall side, a shorter 2x4 on the other side, and two carriage bolts with wing nuts to sandwich it onto the top o...
Terry has heard that if you want to stop drafts, you need to take the trim off from around the inside of windows and seal that gap between the drywall and the window frame behind the trim. He suggests simply covering this gap with aluminum duct tape.That is a great idea Terry. Aluminum duct tap...
John has some old Low-E windows and wants to know if he can use them to build a greenhouse.Well there seems to be a lot of controversy in the window and greenhouse businesses about this. Any coating on a greenhouse window will change the light that reaches the plants, and there are several ty...
Hugh from Vancouver wrote: Our patio door was single glazed and the cold came through it like there was no door there at all. We installed inside storms several years ago and the improvement was like night and day.A couple of years ago, we saw at a local mall show displays of their double g...
Fiberglass is a very interesting option in window frames in that it combines many of the best characteristics from the other window frame choices. In their energy efficiency they are similar to vinyl with the many dead air spaces and far better than the cold conducting metal frames. Their s...
When you have metallic window screens, the sun tends to cook some kind of screen-like pattern of pollution on the window that doesn't want to come off. The key is to use any oven cleaner, which when you think about it, is made for cleaning off cooked-on matter. Be careful, the oven cleaner will...
