5 Great Reasons to Keep Historic Wood Windows

hey guys brent hull build show talking about windows today we've been doing these wood window workshops around the state and people have been saying hey i want that information so two part video we're gonna we're gonna put these together show you why i would rather have this window in my house than a new window don't believe me stay tuned [Music] okay so the reason why i would rather have that window than a new window is because it can look like this when i know it's fixed up after we've restored it right the whole double hung window system is a beautiful system now historically we're sitting on the outside of the window now but historically this was a system that had two sash okay that moved up and down and they're counterbalanced there's weights here uh literally when we're making new stash we'll weigh the sash let's say it weighs 10 pounds we'd have two five pound weights okay so it's a pretty cool system the way it worked was is that you would have convection air going through the house you'd actually have hot air going out this way and cool air coming in this way so it was like an early air conditioning system and it really worked now we don't use this as much today but what do you do about you know energy efficiency and that tends to be the biggest problem the things we hear or i've got to get rid of my historic windows because they're in such bad shape i've got to get rid of them because they're so drafty i'm going to save so much money on my energy bills i'm here to tell you that that is a lie okay the ftc in 2012 came down on five window companies for false advertising saying that you you could save 50 on your energy bills if you changed your windows that just isn't true and the data now and to back this up is there let me let me explain to you how this works because the real big point is is that you're not going to see us you're not going to see a significant savings on your energy bill if you replace your windows in other words it isn't worth it okay two things one energy think about energy loss in your house okay where does that happen well in a pre-1930s or 40s house you're talking about houses most likely has never been insulated so the majority of your energy loss is actually going out walls and ceilings okay the studies show that only about 10 to 20 percent goes out doors and windows okay 10 on windows now the second piece of that is energy use okay when you pay your energy bill every month how much of that is actually spent on heating and cooling well only about 30 or 40 percent is spent on that the other things are on appliances tvs hot water right other things that are going towards you know your general use so because only 30 or 40 percent of your energy use is even spent on energy efficiency the thought that you're going to change your windows in your house and expect to see a savings on your energy bill it just doesn't happen and that's why the ftc did that so realize that the main argument is that these are so inefficient it's just bogus this then is a very energy efficient window and let me show you why okay because we can take this window weather strip it add insulation to your house and your walls spend a tenth of the money that you would spend on new windows and have a very efficient uh system on your house now historically even going back to the turn of this century they understood that windows were inefficient so what did they do well i'll show you they had and they used screens and storms okay so in the summertime and these are the same size okay and they fit in the same groove okay so essentially what would happen is the summertime comes around and you put your screens in here right your screens would go into your window and now you have nice fresh breezes with no bugs okay wintertime comes around you will take the screen out you'll put the you'll pull the storms out and all of these would have been marked on the side with a number so you know which window they go in these would go in and now you have a very energy efficient sealed house right so if you have an old house you're in a cold cold climate in texas we are median temperature 68 degrees so we don't have a lot of cold weather right but if you're up in the northeast and you have really cold weather the storms are a beautiful way of making your windows much more energy efficient so the idea that you're going to actually save money by taking your windows out it shows that the payback time period is somewhere between 40 and 100 years now on top of that okay most new windows have a warranty of about 10 years okay that's as long as the big manufacturers are willing to warrant their window now when we build windows we're building a hundred year window now we do that because we're restoring hundred year old windows all the time and we know how long they last if you get the wood right if you build it properly it will last a long time so if you've got a 40 to 100 year payback but the new window you're putting in is only going to last 20 to 30 years you don't even get back to that payback time so you're putting in a disposable product and that's really important to remember that your historic windows last a really long time and now i'm going to show you why because we're going to look at wood next so wood quality okay essentially the production and harvesting of lumber if you want to consider that is really changed in the last 80 years okay up until the 1940s essentially all the wood that was being harvested in the in america was virgin forest okay as we moved across the country in the 1850s 1860s we essentially began to harvest and as we uh developed those areas we harvested that wood so the eastern white pine in new york the longleaf yellow pine and then into the 1920s and 30s the furs and redwoods out on the west coast now what that means is is that today most wood especially production wood that would go into a production window is plantation grown that means it is harvested like you would harvest wheat or corn huge plantations in new zealand and chile where they grow trees and tree farms those trees will grow really fast okay and they actually chose a western pond called radiata pine to go into those plantations because it grows so fast now what does that mean well if you've ever been to the redwood forest and know about how dark it is in there how it's kind of gloomy right well essentially what happens is a tree growing up in this old growth forest would grow very slowly okay because it might get sunlight for an hour a day and it couldn't support a lot of branches right sunlight allows the trees to support more branches and so it would go up it would go up and finally when it broke through the canopy then it would start supporting a lot of branches so what you have with an old growth tree is this very long trunk and then these trees right at the top as opposed to a plantation grown forest where all the trees are planted and they're very short and they're growing up almost like christmas trees and until they get 30 or 40 feet high and the sun can't hit the bark they have all kinds of tree branches there now what does that mean a knot is where it's grown into the trunk of the tree right and so if you have a knot that's because there was a branch going in there old growth lumber is very clear there the the other thing is and if you compare these two pieces of wood this is a piece of longleaf yellow pine it's very old notice how tight those growth rings are like 15 growth rings per inch versus this piece of yellow pine from a lumber yard where it might have three growth rings in an inch okay what does that mean well growth rings are about stability okay so if you've ever seen a lumber a piece of two by four at a job site and it looks like a ski jump right that's because it has no stability all of those growth rings add strength and stability okay second part is because it grows up so slow you have a lot more heart wood okay heartwood is the the good stuff right you have two types of wood you have sap wood on the outside you have heartwood in the middle the more heartwood you have the more rot and decay resistant it is you can actually see on this piece of long leaf pine the color difference here and here right this is very light this is very amber okay you can see it too here so basically this is all heartwood and then this is sapwood now forest product labs which is the government testing center for wood and they have actually graded wood by how decay resistant it is there's very resistant moderate and then non-resistant now where do you think radiata pine lies out okay it is a non-resistant wood okay so the fact that it's grown fast there isn't any hardwood and it's not very stable means it won't last very long if you've ever had a new window or a new door that's decayed after five ten three four five years right it's because the wood's no good and if you're going to learn anything from this deal in fact i did a shot a whole video on on on good wood go look for that on the build show the wood is is everything and so if you have a house built before 1940 most likely your windows are made with old growth wood so why would you throw something out that's going to last a hundred years for something that's going to only last 20 years well you wouldn't right and so it doesn't make sense for us to get rid of those old windows because we've got a product that's going to last so long so the next piece we'll talk about glass and why glass is so important for window design so the next piece is glass okay and so glass if you've ever if you have old windows and you look through them and they're kind of shimmering and they're kind of moving right you're looking at old glass now what is that well essentially over the last 200 years we've had three different types of glasses we've had what's called crown glass where they would have actually taken a glass ball and all this would have been handmade right they would have blown made a big ball spun it and they would have made a big sheet of glass that was round okay and then they would cut pieces out of that piece of glass now this goes back to the 1700s and you really couldn't get very big pieces of glass when you're blown when you're making these glass discs that are about this big if you have that type of glass in your house you actually see striations in the glass as it moves around circular striations because it was blown and spun really fast centrifugal force creating the sheet okay next what they did was they made hand blown cylinder glass and they it was the same process but instead of spinning the glass they would actually throw the glass okay and so they'd have their tube they'd be blown the glass and they would actually stand up on these pedestals and like gravity push that glass down so so the striation lines would be like this okay they cut it cut the glass and those big tubes would lay open well that process goes into the you know 18 mid 1800s as the glass industry becomes industrialized in the early 1900s the same process they had a big uh you know vacuum that would go into the glass and then pull up okay and then pull these pieces of glass big long tubes you know eight feet around they would then be laid down cut laid open and they actually grated the glass so that lasts until about the 1940s now in the 1940s they have what's called float glass where float glass is actually made on a conveyor belt and a bed and it actually dries on a piece of tin so that there's no striations in it so that's why ranch style houses and anything after that period has no character in the glass we've we've made up this board because there's a lot of historic glass things that that we see on jobs that are kind of part of the character of how things were made we've got this wire glass that with the chicken wire glass this is called a snowflake glass but there's some wavy glass down here and there's a couple companies that actually still make wavy glass so that you can get that character in that historic feel but this is this demonstrates the different types of character and the different types of pieces of glass because glass tends to be something that is character defining right and so if you can get this glass and when we're making new windows we'll sometimes put in the wavy glass because it's such a great look right it's nothing like getting your cup of coffee in the morning looking out your window and seeing the shimmer of the glass glass because it was such an expensive product because it was handmade for so long means that that that you couldn't make big sheets of glass so in the colonial period the reason they have and even going back forward to the english period where they have little diamonds the reason they have little diamonds of glass because they couldn't make big sheets okay and a very expensive house like carter's grove in virginia would have big sheets of glass okay that all would have been hand crowned glass right probably imported from england very expensive and so even you'll hear stories of houses being taxed based on the amount of glass that they have and so it was one of those products and so it's really character defined it's really important and if you have it you'll want to keep it the last piece of this is that historic windows can be repaired we're going to go back to the window i'm going to show you the standardization of parts that makes that easy and why we restore windows all the time so why does design consistency matter well we had a window from a big manufacturer that shan't be named we probably put in these windows 10 or 15 years ago one of the windows rotted out we said we need to get it replaced and they said well we don't make that window anymore okay so that's the case we just did another house with a with a a different window it didn't match the original windows that were in there 30 years ago now 30 years you might go well yeah i could see that would be a difference the deal is is though with the historic window i can match these parts exactly and because of standardization because of the way they're manufactured because the way they're made we can repair these you know infinite number of times if they needed that so standardization starts in the industries in the uh you know early 1800s and lasts into the 1940s so there's over 100 years of design that doesn't really change the the styles and rails basically are the same size the check rail the mutton bars all those things are easily remade and reproduced and so we can make this window again we can restore it again infinite number of times so hopefully now you won't be throwing out your windows right certainly you shouldn't be looking at your house saying my windows are drafty i need to get rid of them and you're not saying well i'm going to save so much money by replacing my windows it's a no-brainer right it's a no-brainer that you should be keeping them right not the no-brainers should be throwing them away do you know that 50 of the window replacement industry is replacing replacement windows okay so this is something that you you've got a disposable product you put in your house you're wasting your money you've got product that's going to last so long and so well the other thing i the character defining piece i didn't talk about but i've seen houses that have you know 20 over one windows okay which is a very complex hard window to make and i go back later they've replaced the windows with two over one okay the character definition that sometimes old windows have is is a huge deal so you need to keep your historic windows you need to maintain them you need to restore them and next time on the next video the second part of this i'm going to show you how we're actually going to go to someone's house we're going to evaluate it we're going to cut it open we're going to restore it i'm going to show you how easy it is for you to do yourself i'm brent hull thanks for watching

Channel: Brent Hull

Views: 10,204

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Id: uVdy76oS5vc

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021