zeta cross

Buyers love new windows. Everybody wants new windows--including me! Strictly from an energy efficiency standpoint, however, there are a lot more cost effective ways to spend your money. At Penn State, recently, I took an all-day course on The House As a System put on by a great group called Affordable Comfort. One of the instructors offered this analysis: If your heating bill is $1500 a year, heat that you lose from your old windows is costing $300 a season--a 20% loss from windows. If you spend $7500 for new windows, you'll save 10% a year--$150--with new low-E windows. At that rate, it will take you 50 years for the $7500 payback. Wow. New windows, of course, are very attractive to buyers. I'd say you get at least a $2500 increase in sale price. Anyone have any more precise value????And you get the Federal Tax rebate--as long as you buy windows that meet the guidelines. Your state should kick in a little too! Still, the math is clear:Insulation, weatherstripping, duct wrapping and good old caulk are all more cost effective energy savers than new windows.

Don't you love it when a seller gets behind your marketing efforts? My Mt Airy seller has been fabulous! His late sister's home sits up 25 steps. The hill affords privacy and a lovely view of the sunset but the steps are a pain. After 19 years of living and working in the house, his sister had accumulated plenty of stuff. The first time I saw the place, I could tell right away that the family had already removed a lot of things. Stager Jessica Endy, however, still saw a lot of clutter. This weekend the seller and the extended family are taking a lot more things out. And that is Super! But even better--they agreed to paint. Yeah. A chance to use No VOC paint--the kind without toxic vapors. Out of my own pocket, I kicked in the additional $10 a gallon. Benjamin Moore mixed up a Sherwin Williams color. It is Pittsburgh Paint. "Great coverage" said Tim the painter. Tim will soon paint Jessica's kitchen. Her husband gets free paint at his job. If they opt for the regular, free kitchen-appropriate paint, Tim advised Jess to take herself and her baby out of the house for 2 full days when he paints. Tim gets headaches from the kind of tough kitchen paint they want to use, he says. No baby should be breathing it. If a tough bird like Tim gets why No VOC paint is worth it, a seismic shift should occur in the paint industry sooner rather than later!

I have a new listing in Mt. Airy, a super neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia bordering the gorgeous Wissahickon Park. Mt. Airy has a successful food co-op (Weavers Way) and a lot of "crunchy" people. I use that term fondly--proud to be crunchy myself (EcoBroker, NAR Green designation)! Mt. Airy is mentioned in one of my favorite books Bill Bryson's hilarious A Walk In The Woods (about Bryson's adventures hiking the Appalachian Trail). Mt. Airy has even been featured on Oprah because it was one of the first neighborhoods where African Americans and others lived happily and voluntarily in diversity. The seller of the property is the brother of the late owner--He is a pleasure to work for because he readily agreed to paint most of the rooms and stage them--a decision that will sell the house faster and for at least $25,000 more. Potential buyers of the home are young professionals or a young family. So Mt. Airy is a great place to see if Benjamin Moore's No VOC paint can be a marketing tool. Thanks to an Active Rainer's suggestion, the stager chose Sherwin Williams' Killim Beige and a shade of white and a neutral green. Benjamin Moore says they can make any color No VOC, using PIttsburgh Paint...so I paid the additional $10 a gallon myself and the paint is now on the walls. The painter--Jim Lesher--a longtime pro, gave the paint high marks. He said it has great coverage. Open House is in 10 days. I'll let you know the response!

All my buyers want new windows. Hey, I want new windows! But even with the new federal tax credit of $1500, new energy efficient windows don't give you the bang for your energy efficiency buck that you'd think they do. One of the presenters at the ACI Whole House as System presentation that I went to in State College, PA last week made the point. He said homeowners lose 20% of their heat through the windows. Say your heating bill is $1500 for heating season. $300 of that is from heat loss through older windows. Spend $7500 for replacements. Your window efficiency goes from R-1 to R-3, and you save $150 a year. That means 50 years to recover the cost of the new windows! Wow. Better spend the $7500 to plug leaks and insulate. Insulation can take your walls and your ceilings to R-13 or even R-19--way better than R-3. Much faster payback. So caulk and seal your older windows and then gradually replace two a year with architecturally appropriate windows that preserve the character and resale value of your house!

All my buyers want new windows but dollar for dollar, do they save enough energy to justify the cost?

Don't be seduced by the newspaper ads promising big energy savings for low priced replacement windows, warns writer Wayne Curtis in Preservation Magazine, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

"Replacement fireplaces and replacement walls would make more sense," Walter Sedovic, a New York architect who specializes in preservation, told Curtis in the January 2008 Green issue of Preservation. Replacement windows are "easy to construct, easy to transport and easy to sell," Sedovic says, "but they don't really make sense for the energy conscious."

Curtis went to the Whole Building Design Guide for the proof: Older single pane windows have an insulation factor of R1, the Guide says. Modern double glazed windows offer R3. "Taking a window from R1 to R3 will not provide sufficient energy savings to offset the cost of replacement windows and associated waste,"the Guide says. Restoring and maintaining old windows makes more sense, Curtis concludes.

We call them replacement windows because we keep replacing them! Sedovic credits his colleague John Seekircher with coining that phrase.

"...Only 10 to 12 percent of total air infiltration in a building is through the windows," Sedovic told Curtis. "The cold isn't being transferred through the glass. It is through the openings in and around the sash. The energy loss is mostly through the roof and through the sill," Sedovic explained. That is why he advises people to look to their fireplaces and walls for sources of energy loss. The high tech seals on modern windows eventually fail, Curtis writes. "You don't repair them. You replace them." There is a sad irony in the idea of replacing 100 year old windows with so-called "envionmentally responsible" windows that will be junked and replaced every decade or two, Curtis concludes.

We all want an easy, affordable fix, so I am sorry to learn that "replacement windows" are not the cure-all they are advertised to be.