The plastic parts were turning brittle and breaking, the springs were losing their spring, the felt weatherstripping was wearing out… and in all of them the double insulated glass was failing and turning opaque,” Liberty says. “As I gradually became an expert in the field, I noticed that when people called to repair ‘new’ windows, there were problems. And Consumer Reports notes that, after the installation cost of replacement windows is factored in, it would take decades before you break even given those minimal energy savings.ĭavid Liberty, a retired contractor who repaired and restored windows for more than 30 years, told me the replacement window craze is a bunch of marketing nonsense. “This is a scam being perpetrated on the public on a vast scale,” Liberty says. It turns out, multiple studies have found that by replacing the ropes or chains, adding weatherstripping, and installing a good quality storm window (such as the Harvey Tru-Channel), you can make a historic, 100-year-old single-pane window about as energy efficient as a new double-pane replacement window. I had never even considered it, or heard about such a thing. You see, I had no idea that we could have restored all of our clumsy, sticking, broken-but-admittedly-charming old rope-and-pulley windows for about the same cost of replacement windows – and gained comparable energy savings by doing so. And we’re more or less happy with them: They’re easier to open and shut, easier to clean, they keep more heat in the house, and they don’t rattle like a freight car on a windy winter night. We replaced more than a dozen windows over the course of a few years, four or five at a time. I’ve got a story out in the Boston Globe this weekend about replacement windows, including why and when it can make more sense to restore your old windows than to install new ones.Īs I wrote in the Globe, I totally bought into the idea of replacement windows back in 2009, when there were some hefty tax credits available for installing them.
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