We officially decided to go with the Pella Proline aluminum-clad wood casement windows for the 100K House project. The discussion that was sparked in the recent post on thermal shades was the clincher for us.
The Pella offering offered the best balance of modern style, quality, economy and energy efficiency for the home. The higher end brands as far as energy efficiency were just to far out of our budget to be considered in the end. The lower end offerings such as vinyl were also not at all appealing to us from both a green and design perspective.
Pella offers a nice look with aluminum cladding on the exterior in a nice range of modern colors and wooden interiors. The energy performance is good with U values of 0.34 for the operable versions and 0.29 for the fixed versions. We will actually have a number of fixed units in the homes, so the average U value will be around 0.32 for the home. The sliding doors from Pella that we selected also have a U value of 0.33 which is better than I expected.
I searched for a good image to show of the windows but just couldn’t find one of the specific model and style that we are going with. Most of the images show a more traditional window with grilles in between the panes. In case anyone is interested in the full details on Pella’s Proline windows, follow this link to their architectural design manual.
2 comments ↓
Affordable and effective, sounds like a great decision.
Thanks. While the higher performing windows are tempting they are just too expensive for the budget and don’t provide a payback that justifies them.
What would be interesting is putting the money for the radiant and heating system into beefing up the envelope to Passive House standards and see what happens to the budget. Another project…
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