derekcentrico
Member
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2012
- Messages
- 6
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Good evening everyone. It's been a bit since I hopped on this forum. Needless to say, with a kiddo inbound and a stressed wife I'm ready to motivate myself to do some work.
We bought a cookie-cutter house freshly built in 2014. It has plenty of insulation i the attic and between the cinder blocks. However, we have tons of heat pouring through the windows on the south/southwest facing side of our home.
Turns out the developer used just basic impact glass to meet minimum code requirements. Wow who would've thought they would do that, right?
Anyway, balanced the A/C which is barely large enough under proper insulation/windows calculations. It keeps the area cooling and not horrible when running.
However, we see a 10-12F difference in the master bedroom and kitchen as compared to the rest of the house mid-day if the temperatures are 85F or higher. The evenings are just 3-4F difference - not so bad.
I've done tons of reading about SHGC and U-Factor. Clearly, SHGC is a big issue for us. We have windows that are 0.8. I can get windows at a good rate for 0.21 (argon gas, etc.).
The big issue for me is the U-Factor. Vinyl windows are running a good bit more. The U-Factor will be under 0.5 for vinyl vs the non-thermal aluminum alloy which has 1.04.
I'm wondering if the U-Factor will be so important where we have multiple windows side by side as to warrant me spending an extra $200 per window to go vinyl down here...
Any opinion would be greatly appreciated. I'm just not so sure I can sacrifice a few more thousand bucks right now. At the same time, I don't want to spend a heck of a lot of money and it NOT work because I didn't know what I was deciding against.
Making a family costs...want to make the house-side of the equation as optimal as possible.
PS - this isn't for like instant savings on an electric bill. Rather, it's for pure comfort of the Mrses.
THANKS!
We bought a cookie-cutter house freshly built in 2014. It has plenty of insulation i the attic and between the cinder blocks. However, we have tons of heat pouring through the windows on the south/southwest facing side of our home.
Turns out the developer used just basic impact glass to meet minimum code requirements. Wow who would've thought they would do that, right?
Anyway, balanced the A/C which is barely large enough under proper insulation/windows calculations. It keeps the area cooling and not horrible when running.
However, we see a 10-12F difference in the master bedroom and kitchen as compared to the rest of the house mid-day if the temperatures are 85F or higher. The evenings are just 3-4F difference - not so bad.
I've done tons of reading about SHGC and U-Factor. Clearly, SHGC is a big issue for us. We have windows that are 0.8. I can get windows at a good rate for 0.21 (argon gas, etc.).
The big issue for me is the U-Factor. Vinyl windows are running a good bit more. The U-Factor will be under 0.5 for vinyl vs the non-thermal aluminum alloy which has 1.04.
I'm wondering if the U-Factor will be so important where we have multiple windows side by side as to warrant me spending an extra $200 per window to go vinyl down here...
Any opinion would be greatly appreciated. I'm just not so sure I can sacrifice a few more thousand bucks right now. At the same time, I don't want to spend a heck of a lot of money and it NOT work because I didn't know what I was deciding against.
Making a family costs...want to make the house-side of the equation as optimal as possible.
PS - this isn't for like instant savings on an electric bill. Rather, it's for pure comfort of the Mrses.
THANKS!