What are Low-E Windows?
Homeowners are increasingly interested in building materials that are energy-efficient and reduce heating costs over the long-term. All sorts of things are going green nowadays – from renewable resource-based bamboo wood floors to low-flow toilets and smart heating systems, it’s easy to increase your home’s efficiency and save money as well as the environment. There are many ways in which you can modify your house for this purpose, and Low-E windows are an extremely popular type of replacement for standard glass panes. How do these work? 
The “E” in Low-E windows stands for “Emissivity.” Emissivity refers to the ability of a material to absorb incoming energy and emit it via radiation. All materials will either absorb and emit or directly reflect energy. A mirror, for instance, reflects most light energy and only absorbs a little, giving a shiny reflective surface we can look into. Concrete, on the other hand, will absorb most of the thermal energy that hits it, and emit it as heat; this is why it will feel warm to the touch on a summer day.
Sunlight contains a mixture of visible light, ultraviolet rays, and infrared light in the form of heat; window glass is naturally highly emissive, and it lets all three of these wavelengths through into your home. While it’s great to let visible light into your home, the other two are not as helpful; they will interact with surfaces in your home like fabric, wood, tile, and furniture, many of which will absorb and emit the rays. Ultraviolet light causes fabrics to fade and skin to burn; infrared heat will be emitted by your surfaces and increase the heat in your house – like when the sun-drenched tile floor of your kitchen becomes painfully hot to walk on in bare feet.
Low-E windows are coated with a metal that reflects UV and infrared light, while still allowing visible light to pass through. There are two types of Low-e glass: hard coat and soft coat. This refers to the type of material used in coating the glass. In hard coat, a layer of tin is applied directly to the molten glass during production, and it is very tough to scratch it off. Soft coat windows are coated with silver or zinc, applied in a vacuum and sandwiched between another pane of glass to protect the coating. It is also sometimes infused with argon gas to prevent the metals from oxidizing if exposed to air.
While Low-E windows may cost more, they are effective in reducing energy costs for your home; by reflecting ultraviolet and infrared rays away, they prevent overheating in the summer (reducing air conditioning use) and they also help the house retain its heat in the winter by preventing it from escaping through the windows. It’s estimated that they can filter out 40-70% of the heat normally transmitted through window glass, and reduce energy loss by about 40%. However, there are some strange disadvantages to Low-E windows, which we’ll discuss next week.

After a few years of living in your house, it can be difficult to see it through a stranger’s eyes; every nook and cranny contains a lovely memory or unique treasure that makes the home your own. However, a home’s layout should perform a delicate balancing act to appeal to potential future buyers. Ideally, it should strike the right balance between specialization and generalization, and between memorable and neutral. We’ve discussed in previous blog posts how important it can be to have updated kitchens and bathrooms, because these rooms get such heavy use every day; even small updates to the lighting and fixtures can make a world of difference.




As we explored in the past few posts, asbestos became a very popular insulation material at the turn of the 20th century; but after hundreds of asbestos worker deaths, the public became fully aware of the danger behind their walls. In the 1970s and 1980s, the concern spun up into hysteria: asbestos was in our schools, churches, homes, and offices! Since then, sixty countries have banned the use of asbestos, but the United States is not one of them. While asbestos is highly regulated, it still has not been fully banned; it is unlikely to show up in a brand new home, although it may be in an older house that hasn’t been renovated in a long time. So, what do you do if you discover asbestos insulation in your home? 
Asbestos is quite durable in many respects, but the fibers are also incredibly thin – as small as 3 micrometers in width. By comparison, a human hair is 17-181 micrometers wide. The asbestos fibers naturally line up parallel with each other to form crystalline lattice structures. These crystals have three cleavage planes, two of which are much weaker than the third, and can be broken apart into fibrous fragments if sufficient force is applied. In fact, the structure is so soft that it can be broken with a simple finger crushing pressure, sending billions of tiny fragmented asbestos fibers into the environment. In buildings, asbestos can be disturbed and released via air erosion, vibration, fire damage, or abrasion. And if the settled asbestos dust is disturbed by human activities, it can fragment even further.
