Irish say no to PVC windows
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I’d agree with you regarding the stuck-on panes getting irritating the more you look at them 🙂 – effective perhaps for an hotel or similar, but in an intimate domestic setting they’re perhaps overly obvious. This is possibly how Wynns as a protected building got away with it – a city centre hotel with all the attendant urban noise intruding on guest bedrooms could have been looked at with an element of sympathy by planners. And the sashes were ‘only’ 80 years old, and probably had modern glass.
Given how relatively new this product is to the market, I’ve no idea how planners view its use in protected structures, cobalt – others would be better placed to answer. If I was in your position, I’d probably go out of my way to retain as much of the original frames and glass as possible, but failing that, reproduction sashes with high performance single glazing is definitely the best option in fulfilling both aesthetic and most insulation requirements. No idea as to cost for such glass.
But again the old chestnut raises its head – what exactly is ‘energy efficient’? That is, if you don’t have room-by-rrom themostatically controlled heating, having doubling glazing isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference either to your consumption of energy or your fuel bills. If your heating is turned on and left on as it is in most people’s homes without constantly sampling room temperature and turning off accordingly, double glazing, and indeed arguably any insultation, is as good as redundant insofar as fuel consumption is concerned.
Not that this should in any way be used as an excuse in older buildings – as every building should have room thermostats – but it’s also a simple reality that most properties do not. And even if you do, well heating is generally put on in the evening, when shutters are closed and curtains are drawn. The generally modest sash window is by no means the elephant in the room as far as insulation is concerned, unlike walls and ceilings, and they even feature shutters unlike expansive 70s picture windows.
Just some points to consider…Secondary internal glazing is also an option, and can work well in some cases. But generally I’ve yet to see a good example for Georgian or Victorian sashes (casements adopt it much better). With the former, it also tends to ruin the architecture of the internal sash and shutter ensemble 🙁
I work for Bolgers/Ventrolla and there are alot of options instead of double glazing. Also if it’s for draughtproofing, our Ventrolla System is as efficient as double glazing.
Some good news on the PVC, er, front for a change. Hanlon’s pub on NCR, from the very start of the thread, has had its awful brown woodgrain PVC windows replaced back to wooden sliding sashes 🙂 .
Hi Guys,
This is my first time posting here. I have read discussion with interest and am agreement with many points. We restore and manufacture sash windows in Co. Kerry servicing all over Munster.
We are being asked to quote for a lot of new build and have noticed a definite increase in business from pretty savvy customers. Like the member from Galway, to achieve the double glazing for Georgian 6/6 our glazing bar needs to be 35 mm for a 20mm Double Glazed unit. Since the turn of the year we are constantly being asked for 1.1 U Value Glass which is 20mm. There is no way to achieve the tradiontal and correct Georgian look with this spec. You have to use the stick on system with inserts. I agree it will suffice for large scale developments.
We try to keep our customers to 14mm double glazed units allowing us to achieve the georgian look and are currently reducting our 35mm bar down below 30mm still not 100% tradional.
I think sash windows and timber windows are full of character and are far more environmentally friendly. Our business allows us to keep old skills alive. Show me a 100 year old PVC window! They are unproven over the long term. We recently refurbished sash windows that were well over 100 years. They turned out exceptionally well. While I have self interest at heart regards sash windows I also believe our surroundings are enhanced by them. PVC is not what we need in this country any more and we have completed two jobs this month where the old pvc was ripped out and traditional sash put back in. The pity with PVC when it is fitted is the old boxes are damaged in the process. That is my two cents.
Thanks for that. Good to hear you’re concerned to get an accurate glazing-bar look when making Georgian windows within the constraints of double glazing.
PVC is wretched, to be sure! A product of the petro-chemicl industry.
I’m surprised to hear that you can use any double glazing and still retain an authentic look, Conserve A Sash – do 14mm units really allow this? What is the thickness of the glazing bar in that case? Do you have any pictures of your units like this in action? Many thanks.
Hi Graham,
I will post pics when we complete our next job on this. As discussed it is difficult. In the last month glass and UV spec have been the number 1 request from customers. Consequently we have responded by starting to use 20mm units and the glazing bar will not be tradional. The only way is to keep it single. The majority of our business is conservation so the issue doesn’t arise to often. We would love to keep the look on new windows. We rocommend that if you want an authentic Georgian look you go single glazed. No other way around it. With 14 mm unit we are trying to get the glazing bar as thin as possible but the result will never be traditional.
PS Graham if you read my post it states
“We try to keep our customers to 14mm double glazed units allowing us to achieve the georgian look and are currently reducting our 35mm bar down below 30mm still not 100% tradional.”
The 100% traditional look cannot be achieved with Double Glazing on Georgian windows – we would never state that we could! We try and get as close as possible. We have found recently most customers understand it cannot be achieved.
‘Conserve A Sash’, I want to give this example of a glazing bar type that is beginning to be seen a lot and ask you what you think:
No. 6 Capel Street (seen at the end of the block, above) had some funny windows on the first floor until recently. But they’ve now been replaced with 2-over-2 sashes as on the upper floors, a welcome measure to improve the design unity of the façade and the terrace as a whole.
But unfortunately the new windows (above) have the thick, clumsy glazing bar you associate with sub-divided, double-glazed sashes, and it jars with the slender bars of the existing old windows on the upper floors imo. A small thing perhaps, but they’re becoming quite common. Can this glazing bar in double-glazing be improved upon in your opinion, or, as joyce from Bolgers/Ventrolla maintains, it would be better to stick with single glazing; there are options which are just as efficient as double-glazing?
They are pretty ugly. I think those windows are not timber, I may stand corrected on that one. Joyce is pretty on the ball to be honest. To get the narrow glazing bar it has to be single glazed or you can go the stick on route which in this setting would suffice. I know the street well and has come on lot in recent years still a way to go though. They look like pvc sash or some type of import I haven’t come across. I would be interested to find out though if anyone knows.
Oh they’re without question timber. Just bad ones.
Of course this whole problem could be solved completely in new builds if people accepted early Georgian glazing bars rather than later ones 😉
Perhaps the best compromise would be to use Traditional single glazing on the windows for the astetics, and have a secondary double glazed inner window / shutters to provide the thermal requirments.
I’m pretty sure the Capel Street windows were timber, but they do have a plastic moulding-ey look alright.
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Buildings recorded by the NIAH in the early ‘00s have since been PVC’d. Here are just four examples I’ve noticed – three of them because I worked on the survey in question (Kildare) and remember the buildings. God knows how many others there are from all around the country:
Newbridge, Co. Kildare, 2003
And the same building now.
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Leixlip, Co. Kildare, 2003. The pictures of the NIAH’s buildings have been published at such a miniscule size that it’s sometimes hard to even see what kind of windows are in the building, and there aren’t always additional detail shots. But I remember that this building had fine early-19th century sashes.
And now with PVC.
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Kilcock, Co. Kildare, 2003. Same problem here. If it wasn’t for the window close-up in ‘Additional Images’ you would scarcely be able to tell that the building had had sashes when it was recorded, and the picture is not quite sharp either.
In any event it’s been all plastic-ed up now. Yum, yum.
PVC-ing of old buildings in Irish towns seems to indicate that the building is going to be used rather than let rot, or even – shock horror – lived in by natives!
Old building in the Market Square in Blessington, Co. Wicklow, 2004. Again, miserably sized picture and you can just about see the sashes – and no additional photos.
But it’s really had a bollocking now.
Prior to work (my pic)
And look at the numbskull 1970s-style rear extension that’s been added along with the PVC, destroying the vernacular form of the building ….. and this just last year to a prominently-sited building in the market square of a town!
It’s wild out there. In the regions, there seems to be a special planning rule that doesn’t appear in any development plan or planning act : if the local building owner wants to invest in his/her building, you bloody well let them do so, in whatever way they see fit …
At the other end of the Square in Blessington, there is a similar vernacular-Georgian building, marked over on the left.
Here it is in a 1960s picture.
And here it is as recorded by the NIAH in 2004, with PVC Georgian windows.
The building has just been refurbished. Great – an opportunity then to remove the plastic windows and reinstate accurate replicas of the original painted timber sash windows, thus restoring the integrity of the building, right?
Unfortunately not. Cheap flap stained-timber mock-sashes have just been put in.
What’s the problem Wicklow County Council? You’ve had 7 years now to write Protected Structures and Archit. Conservation Areas in your Development Plan, yet these two significant vernacular buildings in the middle of Blessington have been fouled up within the past year – at least I’m assuming that a lack of P&D Act 2000 protection is why this has happened.
But even if they are not protected, the civilised thing to do now when these type of older buildings come up for repair is to ensure that features and character is appropriately restored – and god knows we can afford to do that these days – and that new extensions are sympathetic, yet all the wrong things have just happened …. It is shameful. What is your policy on older buildings, Wicklow?
Hi,
Can anyone please give me an idea of how much sash windows cost to buy and install? Specifically the sliding single sash window and I would need 3 of them for a typical period red brick house in the Liberties area of Dublin 8.
Also what is the cost difference between buying proper wooden sash windows as described above versus the PVC sash windows? We really want to get authentic wooden ones (the PVC idea repulses me) but we aren’t paying for this (help from relatives) and are being pushed toward the PVC version.
Here is a shot of the house as it is now with the current windows…
Thanks
Above replied to in other thread.
More terrible stuff there Devin – the latter house in particular is truly shocking. It’s barely even recognisable as the same building, especially with those hideous synthetic slates. What a disgrace.
And that’s before it’s painted yellow.
It’s so sad to see all of these buildings being wrecked before protective measures beinf belatedly introduced. And even then let’s face, they don’t prevent original fabric from being lost in this country – rather protected structure or ACA leg often simply plays catch-up in forcing reinstatement after the damage is done :mad:. That’s what ‘protection’ regularly amounts to in Oirland.
A heart-warming scene in Drumcondra in Dublin at the minute.
If nothing else, the PVC door represents a knocking of surely at least €5000 off the value of that property.
Then again Drumcondra is no stranger to plastic, with Bertie’s own Edwardian constituency office stuffed to the gills with the stuff.And, as with the politics, the other crowd aren’t any better. Check out the backdrop in Chez Enda here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhR2KsrB5GQ
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No building, it seems, is safe from PVC. O’Braoinan’s shop in Castlecomer in Killkenny was cited in Nessa Roche’s 1999 book on the history of Irish windows (‘The Legacy of Light’) as a rare example of a traditional pub-grocer with original features intact.
But by the time it came to be recorded by the NIAH in 2003, it’d been PVC’d.
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Not even semi-demolished buildings are safe from PVC! Both pictures above show the remains of the stucco-embellished facade of No. 62 Thomas Street, Dublin, with sash windows still in the 1st floor.
And, a short time later, after PVC-ing.
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It’s not like all this PVCing has continued for want of nothing being done about it. These are from a 1998 report called ‘The Plasticisation of Ireland’:
Ah for crying our loud – O’Braoinan’s just beggars belief! This is just insane! One of the most endearing buildings in that entire book, especially with the setting of the right-hand bay to one side in making the public/private distinction. What a crying shame. And hear was me stupidly thinking at least these buildings would be safe.
And as for the others pictured…
You’d despair. There really is nothing more to be said. Unbelievable 😡
© DevinAs we’ve seen through this thread, the steel window is a part of our built heritage that is not being given the attention deserving of it, and is disappearing at a worrying rate from our urban and suburban streetscapes. Within the next decade it’s most likely that the steel frame will be all but extinct in Ireland, with nothing other than incidental fragments surviving to the odd rear elevation, in modern movement houses with considerate owners on the south side of Dublin, or retained in flagship commercial conservation projects in the occasional urban centre. Although steel is making a comeback in a chunkier form for office developments, the vast majority of our dwindling period stock is surviving purely through neglect – indeed not dissimilar to the timber sash in rural areas – where owners simply don’t have the will or the money, or have lived all their lives with the same windows, to have them replaced with something else.
Period steel windows are of course not without their faults, especially ones made pre-1955 or thereabouts when galvanising was finally introduced to protect from rust. They suffer from various problems including frame distortion, jamming, rusting, and poor sound and heat insulation. Up until recently they also needed to be painted, with decades of once-fashionable thick, gloopy gloss paint contributing to snagging, and detracting from the frames’ smooth, slim line profiles. It’s no wonder people want rid of these windows.
But it is also because of these now-resolvable latter-day faults that the beauty and quality of steel frames are so overlooked. As a result, they now carry the same baggage with the public as even the gems of modern architecture – there’s an impenetrable barricade that just flatly refuses to allow people view them in any other way than ‘ugly and modern’. Without question some were better designed than others, but the majority have an unabashed appeal in being slender and elegant, crisp and modern, and with an underlying hint of an admirable desire to open up their host buildings to the world, in a new light-filled, transparent era. How grand, bright and optimistic the great wine-bricked complexes of 1930’s Dublin must have been in their original forms, before being short-sightedly bastardised with cheap plastic frames, merely contributing to perceptions of the second-rate, and down-at-heel environments.
Of course, whatever of their heritage value, there is little question that steel was the PVC of its age: a cheap, mass-produced, quick-fix solution that could be churned out at lightning speed, and be adapted for use in everything from industrial to commercial to residential applications, the latter also encompassing both public and private housing in urban and suburban locations. It was the wonder material of the inter and post-war years, arriving just in time for the explosion in housing building and the wider construction industry in the UK of the early and mid-twentieth century. It also arrived in Ireland in time for the great slum clearances of the 1920s and 1930s, and their replacement with social housing along modernist lines. It was even advertised in a disconcertingly similar way similar to PVC as we saw earlier.
However, unlike PVC, steel is both aesthetically pleasing and relatively environmentally friendly – it is most compatible with the dominant architecture of its age (including today), and is easily recycled and repaired. Like early forms of PVC, period steel was not up to standard in terms of heat and sound insulation, nor longevity or rate of recycling. However it has moved on in leaps and bounds since then, whilst PVC remains as the aesthetically stodgy, environmentally disastrous and historically insensitive product it always has been, from production, through its life cycle, to disposal, in spite of improvements in insulation and security.
Steel, relative to timber is still environmentally damaging to produce – albeit not as much as PVC – due to pollutants emitted and the enormous amounts of energy consumed during production. However once steel has been created, it can be easily recycled over and over again, using only a quarter of the initial energy (this time electricity) consumed to produce it, and with minimal discharges. The steel industry now relies on scrap/recycled steel for a third of all steel in circulation, and increasingly so. Steel windows can be easily recycled, and in theory recycling old units could actually help contribute to the cost of replacement frames were proper procedures in place, such is their value as scrap metal. Construction scrap like steel window frames is also one of the easiest metal products to recycle as there’s little to separate: for example, over 95% of certain types of structural steel like I-beams and plates are recycled in the UK. Hence when period steel frames come to the end of their life, it could be argued that recycling them returns steel back into the lifecycle, to be replaced – in theory – with the same volume of recycled steel. Unfortunately global demand for the metal at the moment is such that twice as much raw steel is created as is recycled annually, so in spite of the principle, a small gesture like replacing domestic window frames with recycled steel makes little difference in the current market.
Steel windows gradually replaced iron window frames, used mainly in industrial buildings and churches, in the early 20th century, but really arrived in Ireland following the destruction of Dublin’s north inner city in 1916 and 1922, and Cork’s city centre in 1920. Their subsequent reconstructions offered the ideal opportunity to put this new material to the test in modern commercial architecture.
One of its first uses was in the rebuilding of what is now the Supermacs building on Lower O’Connell Street in Dublin, completed c.1918.
On initial impression, the traditional leaded lights belies the nature of the modern material. Curiously, it would appear that the bay decorative swags are also of cast metal, probably iron.
Across the road, the current Ulster Bank building made minimal use of the material c.1921-23.
While further down, the Grand Central building also features highly elegant steel frames, complemented with timber sashes.
A lovely tilting specimen.
The same can be said of the Garda station on the Upper street from the mid-20s, relegating the (probably still cheaper) timber sash to the attic storey.
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