Just in case you missed it, here’s DunRite Windows & Doors Owner Sal Sucato, joining Rosie & Romey Romero on the Rosie On The House podcast. Give it a listen, or jump down to the transcript below, then let us know what you think!

TRANSCRIPT

Over 30 years of serving the Arizona homeowner 13 years in a row, ranking Arizona’s best referral network. Rosie on the House dot com.

Protecting you, informing you and educating you. It’s Rosie on the house.

Oh, yeah, it is. Come on in, y’all. Every Arizona homeowner’s happy place. Rosie on the house. We get here every Saturday morning to inform you, protect you and entertain you on each and every topic having to do with your maintenance, repair or remodeling of your house, home, castle or cabin. We’ve been voted Arizona’s number one homeowner resource and contractor referral directory for 14 years running.

Been doing the show for 34 years. Don’t even think about touching your house till you touch base with Rosie on the House. And here’s how you do that this morning. Right now, get over to your phone and dial toll-free 1-888-767-4348. Allow me the privilege. US, all of us here as a team of putting our 48 years of experience building and remodeling Arizona homes to work for you No matter where you are in the state or what you’re trying to get done, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve already tried in your neighborhood once or twice. Put my experience to work for you, and if I haven’t tried it, I probably know someone who has. And we can put you in touch with somebody to help you out. Go ahead and give us a call at 1-888-767-4348. And when I say “our team and us,” I’ve got Romey, my oldest son, here co-hosting the show with me, in all his years of home inspecting and remodeling experience. I’ve got my wife, sweet Jennifer, call-screening, taking your name and number and putting you in queue. And we’ll get to your question as quick as we can. We’ve got Gary Dominge, who is here as our broadcast engineer. And in studio this morning, we had a special guest to cover the topic of the day: winders [windows]. And that’s Sal Sucato from DunRite Window. Good morning, Mr. Sal, and thank you for joining us this Saturday morning.

Well, thanks for having me, guys.

Now, look, before we get to Windows, so I’m I got I got to get on my soapbox and brag a little bit. All right. Thank you. You got to listen to this carefully. I got a letter this week addressed to Rosie Romero.

Okay.

Here’s how it here’s what it said. After a careful and thorough selection process and criteria by industry stalwart, remember that? Careful and thorough. It comes as it comes in key here. Industry stalwarts for your dedication and expertise and exploring nature. It is our great pleasure to announce that you have been shortlisted by our board for your talent and great leadership for the upcoming banquet and special publication of the ten Most Influential Women Leaders of 2022.

[laughing]

That’s right.

What do you do with that?

So I don’t know. Are you going to show up?

You know what it reminds me to.

Throw on a wig.

Or do you remember the Bud Light commercials were like Wednesday night or Ladies Night? It’s Free Bud Light. And it was all these guys dressed up and it’s like, “Another round of beers, ladies?” And, I mean, it’s like got hair pouring out the shirt.

I think I do remember that.

Well, you know, it’s like a boy named Sue. Everybody asked me, did you learn did you learn to fight or run? Well, I was on the high school wrestling team, but I was also the fastest kid on the football team.

So choose your battles.

It depends who was making fun of me, whether I decided to either fight or run. Sal’s here to answer any question y’all might have. We want to talk this morning for the next hour about the importance that windows play in the in the role they have in the outside envelope. The thermal blanket. The thermal cover called your house, because they are your weakest link.

Absolutely.

Thermally, they are your weakest link.

That’s exactly what I was just thinking when you were talking. They absolutely are the most difficult part of the energy efficiency process for your entire home.

It’s hilarious to me when I see people putting up, ah, R-60 walls, a lot of pan line walls. They’re going to, they’re going to insulate the house to R-60 and then they put in an R2 window.

Or a old single pane window.

Well, yeah, I mean, they are R-zero.

But I’ve said for a long time, if you could get your building envelope, if you could get your building up at a constant R-10, you’d probably be as cost effective and comfortable as economically possible. And we can’t quite get there, but that’s about all we need to do it and do it right.

You know you throw me off with the R’s every time.

I know you. I know you’re in the new world.

In the industry of the windows, it’s all solar heat gain and u-factor. So but yes, you are as as strong as your weakest link for your entire energy efficiency envelope. Absolutely.

And the window is a weak link for a lot of reasons. One, you’ve got a junction now; you’re making a transition of materials from your framing or your masonry wall to your window frame.

Absolutely.

Weak point number one. Any time you’re transitioning materials, you’ve got that junction to deal with.

Correct.

Thermal coefficients, expansion, contraction. Then you’ve got this… Windows have a peculiar similarity that they all have glass.

It’s weird, isn’t it. Yeah, it’s weird.

Glass is really a big weak link.

It is the biggest because. Well, I mean you have the frame material, too. But yes, glass is by far… Anything transparent, right, is going to be by far your most energy efficient loss.

So what are your options on glass, today? They’ve certainly come a long way in the last 30 years.

Absolutely. Coming from 30 years ago, you were at the single pane aluminum product, which blocked out about 7% of the heat.

And that glass was what, a 3/16ths of an inch thick?

3/16 was pushing it. It would be more like an eighth of an inch thick. So that was a single strength is what the single pane windows were back in the seventies. It was a single strength.

And they were clear.

Yep, absolutely.

No tint, no solar shield, no nothing.

Well, even in the eighties, they were still clear. In the nineties, they came out with a product called bronze glass, and it was actually a tinted glass. And that was the technology’s best for the time. But going from your single-pane aluminum, which blocked out about 7% of the heat… In the shade, mind you, not in the sun… In the shade. Today’s product, without pushing the envelope, will block out 80%. Once you start pushing the envelope a little bit, you can get very close to blocking out 90% of the heat and 99% of the UV.

We want to talk about that product that produces that. But let’s stay in the old fashion. Let’s talk to the people that may still be living with the older windows and why they ought to consider looking at upgrading their window package. So we’re at a single pane and then all of a sudden someone comes up the idea, “Okay, let’s put two pieces of a thick, clear glass and call it insulated windows.”

Right, right. And that was that was the mid-eighties. So that actually blocked out about it’s in the teens. So maybe 15%, a double pane, clear glass blocks out, about 15% of the heat in the shade.

And it got to the point, we weren’t putting in any single pane windows any more. By the late eighties, early nineties, they were all, “insulated glass.” And some of this insulated glass had as little as an eightth inch air space between the two pieces of glass. So it hardly… Calling it insulated was a stretch.

Well, it just doubled your energy efficiency value from the single-pane to the dual pane. So you again, you were in the mid-teens for blocking out the heat.

Then we started growing the insulation space. We went up to a quarter, 3/8, half inch.

Mm hmm.

Then somebody came up with the idea. Well, let’s fill that space with some gas.

Correct. Argon is what Arizona uses. There is Krypton for different states, but Argon is what we use here. That gives you quite a bit of energy efficiency. However, it’s very little to nothing for the summer months. That’s all for your winter months. So it’s going to do a lot for your U-factor. It’ll do a little bit for sound deadening as well.

Does it. I do not know. It had an acoustic.

Yeah. It’s, it’s more dense than air, so it has I believe about a half of a point, if not one point, off of your STC or on top of your STC rating.

Because that’s the other dimension where windows are your weak link is sound.

Mmm hmm. Absolutely.

They are more acoustic. There is your acoustic break in your envelope all the way around.

We’ve done a lot of work and a lot of… let’s just call it a lot of work into figuring out what’s going to be the best for you. And on an STC if somebody said, you know, I have issues with the neighbors, with the band in the garage or whatever it may be. Yeah, we look at the wall and say, okay, your wall is this STC rating? Let’s go up to that and we’ll look at what’s going to be the best option for you. We never want to make the window more sound-deadening than their wall.

STC sound [together] transmission coefficient.

Yes.

And the higher that is, the quieter you’re going to be inside your home.

Correct. On a layman’s term, it’s plus or minus ten points is half or twice as loud. So a typical single-pane window. Actually, I don’t know the single pane… A typical dual-pane window is 23. Your… I’m sorry, I’m going off of memory here… Your single-pane is 12 to 14, your dual-pane is 17, and then once you start getting into the, you know, dedicating a little bit of money towards that, you can be in a 34, 35 and you can go all the way up to a 40 or so.

And taking it from a ten to a 40. How much sound are you eliminating?

Well, to what you’ll actually notice? Going from your single-pane, you can talk through it, right? You can have a normal conversation talking through it. Going to a dual pane; you’ll have to just speak a little bit louder. But you can still have a conversation. Once you get into, let’s say, the new double-pane where it’s a 7/8 spacing, things like that? You now have to yell through it, once you dedicate a little bit of money and go towards the offset glass. So the outside piece of glass is different thickness than the inside piece of glass. You now have to scream through it. So it’s very difficult to even hear when you’re screaming through it. Go ahead.

But those are some of the glass packages that are available. And we’re going to talk to how do you, the homeowner, go through the decision-making process of deciding what investment level should you be making for the window you’re looking for? For your quality of life? We’ll continue the conversation with Sal Sucato, owner of DunRite Windows right after this.

[commercial break]

Hey, if you got a window or door question, you can talk to Sal Sucato 1-888-767-4348, you may text to 411923 as well. We’re talking about selecting that right window or door. And, Sal, you represent multiple different product lines for different applications. I mean, we talk about right plant in the right place, right tree in the right place. You gotta have the right window and the right door in the right place. Sun exposure. How much use is that door getting? Do you want to be able to look through the door with glass or do you want a peep hole that’s the solution.  what? There’s a lot of different factors that go into if you’re, you know, well, if you’re buying it from a builder or it’s already an existing home, obviously what’s there is what you’re getting. But at the point you’re making that investment for yourself, for that custom window or door package, you got a lot of options, a lot of things to consider.

Absolutely. My wife might chuckle when I say this, but the right tool for the right job, I say it all the time. There’s a lot when it comes to considering which product, which material, which look, which energy efficiency, which strength. So we look at a lot of different factors. As the homeowner, what you definitely want to do is figure out what needs you have, whether it’s going to be a energy efficiency, a sound, a color, the frame size, something like that. Typically, a homeowner does need to sacrifice something because they’ll say, you know, I want this, this, this and this. Well, not one manufacturing company makes all of these together in one product. You know, what’s the must haves? And let’s see what’s going to be the best product for you. So we are truly customer service geared, so we offer as much of the nicer products that we can find out there. Typically, we won’t offer anything that’s a builder grade item.

We do have that lifetime warranty on anything other than a wood product. so we can’t offer anything that’s going to fall apart after about five or ten years.

So as far as figuring out the best product for you, like I said, it’s very difficult just on a blanket statement, but there’s a lot of things to consider. One of them is your plans with the house. Are you going to be there for two years? Is this a flip house? Are you going to be there for life? Some people tell me I’m going out feet-first, Sal. So I’ve heard a customer say that and it’s just stuck in my head. Or are you going to gift it down? Are you going to rent it out? If you’re going to rent it out, it might be a different product than if you’re going to gift it down.

And you know, the other the other question people ought to ask themselves is, no matter how long I’m going to be in this house, what quality of life do I want?

Very true.

Yeah, it is. It very truly is. And I’ve said for years that a window package is a lifestyle decision. How many times do you want to get up and move your chair, reading your favorite book, because the sun coming through the window is making it so hot. You’re uncomfortable.

Absolutely. I typically look at the extreme side of things to, you know, just to see how it looks. And I would say for the front door, don’t shave $500 off of the cost of your front door for one that you’re going to sacrifice. You’re going to walk through that thing a thousand times, spend that extra 500 bucks, make it the item that you really love so every time you walk through it, you really enjoy it.

And not to mention 80% of home break ins go right through the front door. Make sure you’ve got the security and the bulk and the strength and the resistance in that unit to not be fall victim to that.

That $500 bucks, let’s say $1500 or whatever, it might be $2000. Yeah, that and that starts to gnaw at you really hard after a year or two years or three years. Like “Gosh I saved, but you know, it’s going to cost me twice that to now get what I wanted. And then, you know, no one’s ever happy when they sacrifice. So wait another month. Wait another two months.

Correct. And you never look in your bank account and go, “Oh, man, look, that $500 [or whatever] is still in there. That’s great. You walk past that door every time, and you go, “Oh, man, you know, I saved that 500 bucks.” Now I go back to a lot of jobs a lot of times, and I get to talk to the customers and see where they are happy and what they’re happy with. And quite honestly, the ones that don’t do the last one remaining window or a few of them, they end up doing it where they do kind of sacrifice a couple of things and go with something that they weren’t overly thrilled with is? And that’s where they usually regret it.

So now I don’t know if this kind of door exists, but I’ve been building this…

I feel a challenge.

It is. I’ve been building the perfect home for myself in my mind and on paper. And I’ve been saving, you know, articles and designs. And Rosie came back from Germany a couple of years ago, actually let me back up before. I’ve always wanted a Dutch door. Okay. You know, the opens, the top, it’s a nice rounded hatch. There’s even a little…

I’ve had them custom made.

And then, so Rosie comes back from Germany a couple of years ago and says, I’ll never install a door for myself that’s curved.

It’s double rabbet.

So this is a wood product, then.

In this case, there were metal and wood. And this door right here… Is that for the studio? Sound? If you open it just so Sal can see it? So, the way it butts up to each other? Can I get a Dutch… what did you call that? Rabbeted? Can I get that? I want a Dutch rabbeted door for my perfect home.

So that’s a sound booth, because we’re in the studio, in the sound booth. That is sound-deadening.

I’m sure we can have that.

And that was two layers of weather stripping.

One on each side. One on each rabbet.

I am up for the challenge.

And the hardware. The hardware has to come from Germany. It’s the only hardware I’ve ever found. It’s got a double rabbeted accommodation.

Well, the hardware would be a little bit different. I think it’s just the main…

[commercial break]

You’re back at Rosie On The House. We’re talking windows and doors in particular, because they are the weak link in your building envelope called your house. They’re the weak link, thermally. They’re the place that you’re going to pay the most money to keep the house comfortable, because that’s where the heat and the cold are going to come through the most often. Sound, as well. They’re that weak link thermally, they’re your weak leak acoustically. So I have always said don’t consider your door and window package as a purely economic decision. It is a quality of life decision. I’ve said that for as long as I’ve been on the radio for 35 years. We have Sal Sucato here from DunRite Windows and Doors.

Sal, again, thanks for coming in. If folks wanted to get a hold of DunRite, how would they do that?

They can call us at 602-456-2227 or log on at www.azwindowreplacement.com.

And because it’s Saturday, we always ask our guest, “Would there be an answer on that phone number this morning?”

I’m going to cringe and say no. Unfortunately, that’s not answered. The phones are Monday through Friday 8 to 5, but you can certainly leave your name and number and absolutely somebody will call you back the next business day.

Okay. We did get a text and a call over the break, and the homeowner wants to sounds like he kind of wants to tackle window replacement himself. He’s saying, “Okay, given the different exterior wall materials, what’s the easiest one to replace and what’s the hardest window to replace?” And boy, that can be a long conversation just in and of itself.

It can. But going on the full spectrum, from the very bottom to the very top, a block opening is going to be the easiest window to replace. If you are a DIY, that’s the one that I would say is possibly feasible. But go on on the other end of that spectrum, either a smooth stucco finished home or having the brick veneer or a stone veneer around the window – those are going to be one of your more difficult tasks.

You’re going from one end to the other. It broke my heart watching a home, getting remodeled not far from my house, just a couple of blocks. They installed the windows. They lathed and plastered it and put no flashing on any of the windows. None.

Okay.

You may have seen this house. It’s not far from you. They then went in with a diamond saw blade.

And cut for three and a half inches back?

Cut all the new stucco off the windows. I guess they the stucco guy just got there before they could flash it? So they had to cut all the stucco out.

That house is on Cactus. I’ve seen it.

It broke my heart to see them cutting all that out for the flashing not getting installed.

So tying into the moisture barrier, if there is a moisture barrier… there are a lot of homes out there that don’t even have a moisture barrier…

That’s right.

Yeah, there’s no tar paper. There’s just the foam.

So it never is wet in Arizona. We don’t need that. Right? That was that that was the thought process of the seventies.

I would say eighties to an even half of the nineties, maybe a good portion of the nineties as well. So there’s a lot of things that you can do. What you’re ultimately trying to do is, if any moisture gets behind your stucco, it’s trying to… you need to divert it so it goes around that window and back out the weep holes. That’s ultimately the goal.

And the water will get in your stucco. Stucco is not waterproof.

It’s porous. Absolutely. It will absorb. Yup.

So, that’s people always ask us, “Rosey, why do you recommend painting a stucco home every 7 to 10 years? That’s exactly the reason why. That stucco needs a fresh raincoat.

Well, let’s just talk about that. So the moisture barrier, let’s say you have the moisture barrier. It’s the tar paper;  that’s 95-99% of what’s out there. For homes that have a moisture barrier.

Black tar paper and you have a bazillion holes in it and it’s not a self-sealing.

You’ve nailed it. You’re holding the foam on, you’re holding the chicken wire on, you’re holding the pop-outs on. You have so many holes in that, and it’s not a self-sealing membrane. So that is how many..

Violations.

… How many holes you have in your moisture barrier.

Right?

So I believe along with you, a nice finish top coat is by far the best thing to do to seal all of your stucco.

So if a homeowner wants to try and tackle… I like replacing windows in a masonry home. I usually get an apprentice or even one of my grandchildren and I give them a four-pound sledge and I say, “Throw it through the window.”

I hope he’s wearing some safety.

And so we we bust out the glass, we cave in the frame, and then we just tied, strapped to the frame, put it on the back of the bumper and just rip it out.

I’m picturing this as you go. So is this a quad? Is this a quad or just an ATV that you’re doing this, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So…

Not the DunRite method.

And not DunRite. Right. But at one time, in those masonry single frame windows, we actually had masonry heavy duty masonry clips.

Clips.

That went in to the ground joints. And I mean, those windows were really whole.

They were. And you would actually set… so those clips a lot of times were welded to the frames.

Yeah, that’s right.

So you would set. So my history, is I was a mason for many, many years, so that’s actually how I first started.

Having a mason set your windshield and door frames.

That’s exactly what it would be.

You know.

So you would set the window in on the sill, and then you would build the block wall up against that window. And every three or four courses, you would have a clip and you would just embedded in the mortar.

Those, those windows were there.

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Then later we went to just using some metal anchors in the frame, and then we just started screwing into the mason. Those are pretty easy to take out.

Ummm, I don’t know if I personally have come across any that were screwed in just as an original installation. I’m not certain about that.

How are you? We’ve removed many windows that were mortar joint clipped.

Right.

And just had a masonry screw put in the window frame, holding it into the block.

Almost like a steel casement window.

Yeah, exactly. Very, very easy to get out.

The steel casement? Ehhh, depends on the person. I’ve seen some people actually take down the wall trying to get there. I’m not kidding. I have seen it. It was a GC on a job we were at and we said, “Well, let’s let’s show you an easier way to take out that steel cage.”

Oh, man. The old steel Torrance windows. Boy, those things.

It didn’t come with a seal from the manufacturing company. There was no seal.

Yeah, but you didn’t know how well they were built ’til you try and tear them out.  They are sturdy windows, that’s for sure. Not very efficient windows; not very acoustically high performing windows. But, boy, they were sturdy.

Well, they were steel, so…

So if this homeowner wants to replace it, he’s got a frame home, inch of foam, chicken wire and stucco. There’s some very particular things he needs to know about.  That isn’t just removing the window and slapping a new window in there.

There’s a lot of things to consider. What’s your exposure, if you have a pop out, what your original design is. Sometimes the window is going to be sitting inside of a buck and you have two inches of stucco, then it turns back outside. So there’s many different things, depending on what your moisture barrier looks like.

I believe the real question is, “What kind of damage are you going to have in doing that?” So there’s a lot of different avenues to achieve a waterproof leak type window. The… I don’t know how I can say the easiest way for a DIY to do it, but you’re definitely going to end up with having to repaint if you’re not going to leave that existing perimeter frame intact. So that is one way that it can be done.

You can leave that existing perimeter frame intact, you can go over it. It’s not my preferred method. It’s called the jump frame.

It can look a little bulky, boxy, but it is an excellent DIY project.

As long as it doesn’t have a header leak already, because that’s not going to fix the header leak. Okay. So if you have a header leak on an existing window, typically you either have a stucco leak or you have a roof leak or your windows failing. But usually a window is not going to fail on the top. It’s going to fail on the bottom of an old aluminum window or something like that.

Okay. A good indication, a good tip. So do it yourself window replacement can be fairly complicated. You and I have just used examples of contractors we’ve seen recently doing it wrong.

Oh yeah. Well, there’s, there’s so many different applications for what has been done in the past to tie in nicely, that it’s definitely a trial and error from the last, you know, 20-30 years on what is the best way of doing so. So we do… depending on the application, but let’s say we have a door that’s on an overhang for a patio. We remove that door and we have flashing that rolls up over that stoop, and now we want to set the door back down. Well, we’re going to set that into a custom made drip pan to make sure that we have a proper overlapping on that window flashing that goes out to that upper deck. So there’s just a lot of things to take into consideration for the actual construction at hand. And almost every house is different.

Well, that door to a walk out second story deck is probably the trickiest most technical installation that there is.

That and considering the right product as well, because let’s say your south facing. You have no you have full exposure, you’re taking a lot of the wind-driven rain. And we all know that the rain storms that we’re having these days are kind of wild. You don’t want to be set up with a sill that only will allow up to a 45 mile an hour wind-driven rain. After that, it’s going to leak. Well, you’re always going to have a leak if that’s the product that you have purchased. So you have to make sure that the product is right, the installation is right.

And I guess as far as leaks, that’s really the two main things that you have to really consider.

Yeah, those threshold pans just make all the difference in the world where that deck is coming into the floor level of the second story and keeping the water out. Right.

Absolutely.

That’s a big trick.

And the design of it and the installation of it is very, very important. Yeah, there’s quite a few minor things that can make a difference.

What is some of the confusion homeowners have about window and door purchasing and contracting? What are some of the surprises and and the horror stories? Is there a recurring theme out there, that we would need to warm warn homeowners about?

What I have seen in the past is… some homeowners were left with finishing their own stucco. Blows me away. I don’t know how a a company can even come in and replace the windows and leave just gaping holes of stucco and it’s not finished. Typically, a window and door company should–what I believe, now this is just my belief–should finish everything, except for painting. I don’t think any window and door companies do painting. We don’t do painting.

But it needs to be very clear that the job is going to be completed up to that point. So the homeowner is not shocked, and it needs to be all included into the contract price as well.

If you’re not controlling the finished installation of all the finished products, how are you? How are you ensuring the integrity of the window installation to begin with?

There’s a huge opportunity for two people to be pointing at each other. Yeah, absolutely. And then that leaves the homeowner just dumbfounded as to what’s next and what recourses they have, if they have a window leak, if something’s not correct. Yeah, I don’t believe that is correct at all. So it needs to be all held or handled in house.

Window and door conversation with Sal Sucato of DunRite, a Rosie-certified window and door installation specialist. We’ll be back with Sal right after this.

If you’ve got a question, text it or call it. We’ll see what we can do about answering it.

It’s Rosie On The House, with Sal Sucato of DunRite Windows and Doors. Windows done once, windows done right. What’s our final takeaway? We’ve only have one segment left. It always flies.

That it does. I’m shocked.

I know it doesn’t feel like we’ve been talking about this for almost an hour.

I can talk windows to long. My wife can tell ya.

I didn’t know you were originally a mason. I… a lot of pieces fell into place when you mentioned that.

Well, I’m Italian, so.

I grew up actually building a lot of the water treatment plant perimeter walls and baffle walls in the holding tanks. I did that for many years.

Interesting. Very cool.

Yeah. One of my major projects I 17 and Dunlap. There’s that water treatment plant just south of Metro Mall? Where the Metro Center Mall used to be? That was one of mine. I was the G.. I was the foreman there when I was about 20. And that was a year and a half project.

Wow. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of construction going on in that area right now.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Everywhere.

Yeah.

What did you want? What did you want to warn homeowners about? In their thought-processes of upgrading doors and windows? What should they be careful of?

Warn homeowners of? Well, we talked about, you know, what to keep in mind when hiring somebody. You want to make sure that it’s all completed by the same… under the same contract, by the same company. I guess what I have seen in the past is when homeowners would purchase just a few windows because they’re forced to… Let’s say that a storm came through and and blew out three or four of their windows. And they said, you know what, these are the only ones. Let’s go ahead and replace them.

Okay.

And then when we replace them, typically, if we’re replacing when it’s hot out, they will call us immediately and say, “I had no clue of the energy-efficiency difference from the windows that I currently have to these new ones. We have to replace the rest of them.

Interesting.

Mm hmm. It happens almost all the time, when we do a partial house window replacement in the middle of the summer. Now, we usually don’t get that call right away when it’s great weather, when it’s winter or something like that. But then we’ll get it when it’s, you know, starting to hit 100, 110, they go, “Oh, man, the west side of the house is now the cooler side of the house, and the rest is still hot. It’s clearly the windows.”

So in considering window replacement, of course, budget will play a role in the decision making process and sometimes sometimes maybe we can’t afford to go all the way around the house.

Yes, absolutely. So window costs fluctuate a lot, as everything does, and the window manufacturing process and colors available, things like that. It’s just it’s changing rapidly. If you do replace your windows, I would suggest not doing a partial. Typically, I would suggest doing the entire thing. One, you you get the better price because price is typically don’t go down.

So you’re getting the price of today. You start benefiting from the energy efficiency gain and the loss of your electric bill. If you can’t afford it, we do have some financing options that work out very well. Actually, one of the financing options is you don’t have a payment start until after the job is completed. Let’s say you pick a product that has a four or five month lead time. Your first payment won’t even be due until after that installation.

Okay. All right. So that’s great options. And you’re going to replace a couple of windows and you’re going to realize how much more efficient they are than what you had thermally, as well as acoustically. You’re going to realize how much quieter the home is. And we talked a little bit about what we could do to increase the sound- deadening ability of windows and its width of glass panels. The separating space.

Could you consider going triple glazed?

Triple glazed. The benefit for a triple pane window is winter months, energy efficiency and sound. But you can still achieve the same sound detonating capabilities by doing an offset glass. So what people have seen in the past, or what I have heard in the past, is people tell me their house feels so much more secure. And what that is, is actually the sound deafening of those new windows.

Interesting.

And that happens a bit. You will actually… since we’re on that, you’ll see a huge difference in dust, as well.

Even going from your regular single-pane or regular dual-pane windows to the new energy efficient dual-pane? You’re going to have a huge difference in sound, without even spending any extra money getting the offset. The offset glass.

Now, I’ve said for years, generally speaking, below the Mogollon Rim, it doesn’t pay to spend the extra money for triple glaze unless you’re fighting a particular acoustic problem. Do I need to be corrected on that advice?

No, that’s absolutely correct. Again, when you’re looking at sound deadening, you look at the sound deadening capabilities of your wall. Whatever it’s constructed out of, there are forms that will tell you this is the STC of 40, whatever it may be. So we say, okay, what window is going to get us to that point? What’s below that point? And that’s where we want to stay.

So we’ve actually installed true sound deadening acoustic windows that are as wide as seven inches. You have to open the window twice to be able to get out. They have a STC rating of like 44. I have installed one personally, went there and watched an 18 wheeler drive by and you cannot even hear the 18 wheeler.

But we can get those houses next to busy streets acoustically comfortable inside?

Oh, absolutely. We do it all the time.

And DunRite’s number?

602-456-2227.

All right. So thanks again for sharing your wisdom and your expertise in windows and doors. Sal Sucato of DunRite Windows and Doors. Rosie-Certified.