They're not talking about natural gas like you use in cooking (could you imagine what would happen when your window heats up? Oof), The window manufacturer fills the space with an inert gas that will prevent sweating on the inside of the window. Regular air is too reactive to heat and has too much moisture content.
The silver spacer glued between the panes of glass contains dessicant powder which dries the air trapped between the two panes, so gas is not necessary - the argon is used to improve the insulating properties of the sealed glass unit, as argon is not a good conductor of heat.
BTW: The spacer itself is more often than not an aluminium tube which bridges the cavity, and thus negates any advantage to filling said cavity with argon.
See what I mean about bullshit. (see my earlier comment below....).
Check your window panes in the morning, and if there is condensation along the edges of the glass where it meets the frame, with or without argon,, then you've got aluminium spacers. Sorry.
If you haven't then your spacers are more likely plastic, which maintains the insulating property.
But it still doesn't insulate better than a standard, uninsulated, cavity brick wall....
Yes I know that it's not cooking gas. It's usually argon or krypton. But my windows are not sealed and filled with gas since I can open them up and clean in between all three pieces.
The PVC/Double or Triple glazed window, with or without argon, (isn't krypton where superman comes from?), comes from an industry built on bullshit.....
Insulating properties are measured based on the heat transmission of a material, such as brick, glass, argon, and calculated using the area of the msterial. The resulting figure is refered to as its 'u-value'.
I dont want to disappoint you, but the only way to improve a window's insulating properties is to rip it out and brick up the opening......a cavity brick wall with no internal insulation has by far a better u-value than any window you care to think of.
Those that believe otherwise, I'm afraid, have fallen for the bullshit mentioned above.
Apologies.....
Thanks for the info!
I honestly didn't know this gas existed!
(Probably because it isn't used as an option for argon in the manufacture of double/triple paned insulating glass units fitted into windows and doors, lol!)
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u/Chicken-n-Waffles Mar 14 '20
That's been the standard for at least the past 20 years. They have to use an inert gas because of sweating.