PLANITHERM is Europe’s best selling range of high performance low emissivity glass. The glass utilises the very latest advancements in thermally insulating glass coating technology.
Specially manufactured by Saint-Gobain Glass for the UK market, PLANITHERM products are specifically designed to keep interiors more comfortable in the winter months and improve your home’s energy efficiency.
Simple, on every energy efficient or inefficient product nowadays you’ll find one of these energy labels to help you chose. Whether it is a freezer or a light bulb, the scale runs from inefficient G or F standards right up to an A rating. But with windows an A rating is not just a little bit better; A-rated marks a huge difference. It is the tipping point where a window moves from costing you money, to saving you money
Of course all old, uncoated double glazing offers a limited level of heat retention. However, Building Regulations now state that an energy efficient window glass must be used in all replacement windows and a double glazed unit containing PLANITHERM is on average 40% more thermally efficient than standard non-coated double glazing.
It is a simple choice, how much your windows heat the outside, or how much they heat the inside. Let me show you using these two windows. Don’t be fooled by the fact that they look the same. This is a standard doubled glazed window with an F rating and an energy index of -70. That -70 is a measure of kilowatts of energy it would lose in a year. This is a 1kw electric fire, so for every square metre of window like this with a -70 energy index that is the equivalent of having one of these [electric fires] outside for 70 hours. You’d be literally heating the street as the average house has around 12m2 of windows like this. That would be the equivalent of heating the street with 840 of these fires for an hour.
Now this window although it looks the same is very different, this is an A rated window with energy index of +1. It has one pane of glass with a low iron content to maximise the amount of light coming in and it has one pane of glass which is coated to maximise the amount of heat staying in. Now that +1 is the key because that is the equivalent of not having any of these [electric fires] out in the garden but having one inside switched on. And with 12m2 of windows that is the equivalent of having the heat from this fire inside for 12 hours. Where we used to measure windows by how much heat they did or didn’t leak, we now have windows measured by how much heat they add.
A window that actually heats our homes, now wouldn’t our ancestors have loved that.