November 9, 2021

Insulating Your Home With Thermally Efficient Glazing

Written by Rebecca Clayton

How to improve the insulation of your home with thermally broken glazing systems and where to specify triple glazing.  

Following the COP26 conference and Insulate Britain protests, many architects and specifiers are looking for sustainable ways to improve the insulation of residential dwellings and extensions. There are a number of non-radical ways your glazier can enhance the thermal performance of your glazing systems, which we will explore in this article.  

The first and most important thing to look for is thermally broken glazing. All windows, doors and frameless glass installations should be fully thermally broken to ensure the glass is not a source of heat loss.

IQ’s in-house developed structural glass system, Invisio, is the UK’s first thermally broken structural glazing system. Invisio has been designed to bring bespoke shapes and sizes of frameless glass into reality, with few limitations on design, structure or size.  

Our aluminium window and door systems, characterized by their ultra-slim profiles, are perfect for achieving impressive thermal performances without compromising on sleek and minimal designs. Large sliding glass doors can be integrated within walls of frameless structural glass for a moving glass wall effect, with oversized sliding systems achieving impressive Uw values from just 1.165 W/m2K for double glazed systems. 

There are a number of technical glass solutions that can be specified in conjunction with any glazing system to improve the thermal performance and insulation of your home. As standard, IQ Glass provide Low E glass within all of our glazing systems. Low E glass, short for low emissivity, is known to improve the thermal efficiency of glass and uses a transparent coating that does not alter the appearance of a glass unit. The glass coating will reflect a significantly higher percentage of the heat back into the internal living space, rather than allowing it to escape to the external face of the building.  

The Low E coating is applied to the internal face of the glass unit to ensure the coating will not become damaged or suffer from wear and tear, resulting in durable and long-lasting results. The main benefit to this technical glass solution is the improved insulation which results in a reduced need for heating systems. Another technical glazing solution that should be considered is heated glass, which can be specified to act as an invisible heat source. The electrical glass produces a radiant heat source and can be programmed to only switch on when a predetermined temperature is detected.

This helps homeowners to save on heating costs as the heated glass will not need to be on all the time.  

Triple glazing is available to specify within our slim framed aluminium and structural glazing systems. To achieve a specific Uw value or enhance the overall performance of the building, talk to a member of the team about triple glazing. The exact amount that triple glazing would improve the performance depends on a number of factors and will be calculated on a project by project basis but as an example, triple glazed sliding door systems can achieve a Uw value from 0.8 W/m2K and will also improve the acoustic performance.  

Although triple glazing has previously resulted in larger, chunkier profiles, the premium aluminium systems from IQ have been developed to maintain the most minimal design. The sightlines on triple glazed sliding glass door systems can be as little as 26mm, whilst structural glazing systems remain completely frameless when specified as triple glazed units.  

With more homes than ever striving to achieve Passivhaus status and lower carbon footprints, our technical team are on hand to discuss how glazing can be used to insulate the home. Our typical performance values surpass the industry standards set by building regulations, to ensure each glazing installation will be suitable for many years to come.

To speak to us about insulating your home through glazing, get in touch with us at hello@iqglassuk.com.