How Argon Gas is winning the war against heating bills.
We’ve come a long way from putting a sausage dog made from Mum’s old tights across the porch door, not that we are suggesting you should ever stop with the old draft excluder. But there is some much more you can do these days. With heating bills going through the roof the trick is to keep the heat in your house – it’s also a great way of using less fuel. Companies like Safestyle UK are pioneering new techniques in energy efficiency not just for the next generation of new house but also to completely change the feel of our older ones too.
You don’t tend to think of the “double glazing man” having much to do with chemistry and physics but you’d be wrong. The days of windows being simply a sheet of glass in a wooden frame are long gone and seem positively archaic these days. Making the move from single glazing to double glazing can be as profound as when you had central heating fitted for the first time – anyone old enough will never forget the difference that made.
Before double glazing people would have cowered at the thought of a duvet… only fifteen tightly tucked blankets, flannelette sheets and a pair of bed socks where the basic requirements for a good night’s sleep…and let’s not forget the trust hot water bottle which was there to keep you warm rather than to help with stomach cramps.
So where does the chemistry come in to double glazing? Well, none of it would be possible without the float glass technique developed by the Pilkington company which allowed us to produce large sheets of toughened glass to a near perfect thickness. Then there’s the clever nano coatings that are added these days to reduce the amount of heat transferred from the surface of the glass to the outside world.
There is also the double pane of glass that we can thank the Romans for. They originally discovered that their heating bills were going too high in the UK – a bath house needed a lots of wood to keep it warm and they decided to put in two panes of glass rather than one. It certainly worked but this was not the double glazing we know today.
The things that makes double glazing so effective is a little known gas called Argon. It’s shame it’s so unknown but until the modern double glazing industry came along it didn’t really have much to shout about. It doesn’t react with anything. It doesn’t smell of anything and it doesn’t really do anything. Believe it or not we actually have nearly 25 times more Argon in our atmosphere than Carbon Dioxide… so it’s probably just as well it doesn’t do anything. Chemistry loving named it the “lazy gas” because of its inert nature and it is these very properties that make it perfect for energy efficient double glazing.
Argon is rubbish at transferring heat and this is why it is carefully sealed into double glazing units in state of the art manufacturing facilities. And you thought a window was just a window not anymore!
Argon is also a very dry gas and this massively helps with lowering the amount of heat lost through a window. You can walk out on a freezing cold day, the lowest temperature recorded in the area was around minus 18 but this is usually a dry cold and so doesn’t feel as bad as when it’s a couple of degrees about zero and raining that feels so grim because the damp air just sucks the heat straight out of your skin.
If you ever see a double glazing unit with condensation in between the sheets of glass then this means all of the dry Argon gas has leaked out and been replaced with normal, damp air. In other words the unit has failed and doesn’t work anymore.
So when it comes to winning the war against rising gas bills the silent, unsung hero is Argon gas which is so effective at keeping in the heat that they are beginning to develop arctic survival jackets that contain pockets of it.