News Letter - July 2009
The World is changing and we may all be forced to change with it.
Adopting the Kyoto Protocol has already meant sweeping changes to the Building Regulations, which has often led to higher costs and design compromises.
Most Governments of the developed Countries have targeted greater reductions in gas emissions than the Protocol demands and this will lead to further changes to the regulations in the near future.
Cantifix have always been at the forefront of technological advances, which in the last few years has related to better insulated and more intelligent glazing. The onus is undoubtedly on energy conservation and greater sustainability of buildings.
The question is: “Where is it going from here and where will it be in five years time?”
Interestingly Pilkingtons have recently informed us of substantial increases on their standard glass and more modest increases on their high-performance glass. With an increase of 50% on their cost price, Pilkingtons are telling us all that standard glass is no longer a viable building material.
When a major player like Pilkingtons makes strategic decisions about the direction of the market by, effectively, discontinuing a key component in its range, then we all need to take notice.
Cantifix recognises that glass will have a critical role to play in the Construction Industry of the near future, and we understand our involvement in shaping this industry.
Our responsibility is to our Customers and we meet this responsibility by offering a full range of high performance glass, all of which can been seen and explained in our showroom in North London. Changes should be embraced; however we all need to make changes from a position of knowledge and that is where Cantifix can help you.
In 1997 Cantifix included Low E glass as standard on all their projects, which meant a U value of 1.83W/m2K on structural glass. When Part L was introduced in 2000 the U value requirement for glass was 2.3W/m2K and Cantifix introduced argon as standard on all their double glazed units. This brought the U value down to 1.62 W/m2K for structural units. The changes to Part L in 2006 required glass to have a U value of 2.0 W/m2K, at which time we introduced “planitherm” bringing our U values down to 1.2 W/m2K.
If we were to predict the changes in the market for the next 5 years, we expect Building Regulations to require a minimum U value of 1.7 W/m2k and by this date Cantifix will have reduced their U values to 0.9 W/m2K.
These extremely low U values will almost certainly herald the end of steel frames and most aluminium framing too.
The future is transparent.
