Old Window Conundrum: Charm vs Efficiency
If you’ve ever owned an older home, you might be cursing yourself on your energy losses through your windows. Lets face it, there is a duality of older homes and windows: You probably like how they look, but hate how they perform! For me, I love looking through our old leaded window glass (we have a few with original panes of glass from 1906) and seeing the distorted shapes of recognizable landmarks outside. It makes me feel like I’m living in yesteryear and instantly brings some appreciation that this house has seen so much throughout the century that it has been “alive”.
Older glass in our front windows distorts the shapes outside just a little bit
On the flip side of the “charming” coin, is the efficiency of single pane windows. Because double hung sash style windows are traditionally single pane, over time they can develop some pretty serious gaps over time allowing cold and warm air to mix. I took this photo of one of our older bedroom windows before we did the addition on our home. Obviously it was a cold day, and there were some serious air gaps as is evident by the large amount of frozen glass on this window pane.
This window is probably air tight right?
So what can be done if you want to keep the charm of your older windows, but not just throw warm (or cold air in the summer) away from inefficiency in your homes windows? Here are a few solutions:
In our house, I opted to build some storm windows as my first line of defense. In fact, this was my first big woodworking project that I took on as a homeowner, and took me down the path of tool collection. I figured that I had worked with glass before doing stained glass, and had some skills with wood, so how hard could it be? Honestly….it really wasn’t that hard, but I did realize that older homes don’t necessarily have super square window frames anymore, so you have to be careful with measurements of each frame to build your storm windows according to size.
On top of making the windows, we decided that utilizing some cord caulking would be a great way to minimize extra air intrusions. I’ve found that this product does a decent job of blocking cold air from entering our space, and it works even better when used with the storm windows as well.
While the best possible solution from an efficiency standpoint is to replace the older windows with a modern equivalent, I’ve found that this solution (storm windows and rope caulking) has been a good interim solution that allows us to keep the character of our older windows, with a bit of increased efficiency. I’d love to hear about what you think the best solution for old windows are! Do you love them or hate them?
