09 Feb Four Reasons to Choose Fiberglass for Your Home Windows

There’s quite a spectrum of window materials you can choose from when designing or remodeling your house.  Comparing and contrasting all the pros and cons is important when making the best-fit decision for your personal needs.  Today however, we’re focusing in on a single material, fiberglass, and highlighting the four most significant reasons why you should choose it for your home.

Fiberglass is Low Maintenance

You probably hear all of the time about products that are “No Maintenance”.  Frankly, everything requires work of some sort if you want to slow a product’s rate of depreciation, even if that just means you clean your windows from time to time.  When it comes to fiberglass windows, you’re truly getting as low maintenance a window as is available.  Fiberglass windows typically doesn’t have a paint finish. Certain brands actually have an acrylic cap over the fiberglass so you don’t get the paint fade, blistering, or peel that sometimes happens with other products.

Consistency in Materials

The frame, sash, and glass of the fiberglass window will all be made with the same base materials.  That means each part of the window will expand and contract at a similar rate whenever the window is exposed to extreme changes in temperature.  This is extremely important because if parts were to expand and contract at different rates, that’s when you’re most likely to see a seal failure which is a fog develop between the panes of glass.  The seal failure rating on a vinyl window is 12% (on the low end) within the first year. For fiberglass windows, that rating is merely a quarter of 1% over the life of the product.

Fiberglass is Rugged

Using fiberglass allows you the flexibility to install a greater variety of windows, in terms of shapes and sizes, in a variety of applications.  Fiberglass is a structurally sound product.  In fact, it has a similar tensile strength of a quarter inch piece of steel.  That means you can shape it, ship it, handle it, and install it without having to worry as much about damaging the product in the process.  If it’s bitterly cold out and you’re trying to install a vinyl window, you need to be extra careful with handling the product or it will break due to being more brittle.

The Window Manufacturing Process

This reason specifically has to do with Marvin window products and the impact they have on the integrity and appeal of their finish.  Most fiberglass window products are heated and extruded through a template, or dye, in order to create the profile for whatever that product is they are making.  However, Marvin Integrity fiberglass windows are pultruded, or pulled through a dye.  If you know anything about fiberglass strands, there are long and easily bendable when pushed together.  That creates voids within the strands and weakens the product.  On the other hand, when they’re pulled, the coiled strands stretch and tighten so that you get a nice, smooth, strong finish.