Results tagged “Beach” from Bill's Words

We own a beach house with three tall window units at the third-story level. We installed artificial turf in the back yard because nothing grows there for more than a year or two before requiring replacement. The artificial turf was the first of its kind along our strand, and nobody had any idea what we might encounter. However, it turned out to be a brilliant solution to keeping our back yard nice-looking through the season and over the years, others have followed our lead, and it has already saved us one turf replacement.

Before

After

We discovered that windows burned the “lawn” (literally melted it), and the culprits were the three window units on the third floor.

BURN!

What a good number of folks wonder on the internet is why windows burn stripes in the yard or kill their plants, and why they can’t be prevented from doing so. The simple answer is that the glass panels in the windows flex. You can—gently—demonstrate it by pushing the glass yourself. Double-paned or not, they flex. And part of the time they flex out, which makes a convex surface, and part of the time they flex inward, which makes a concave surface. When it’s flexing in, it focuses the light on the nearby victim. In addition to the regular reflection of the glass, which effectively doubles the sun’s strength, you could probably cook a hotdog in its reflections. Manufacturers might be able to make a window stiff enough to avoid the flex, but I doubt you’d want to afford them and they might be too heavy or brittle to be practical.

Our solution, also mentioned above, is VViViD® One-Way Perforated Black Vinyl Privacy Window Film Adhesive Glass Wrap Roll (25ft x 48 inches), currently on Amazon for $83. Applied to the outside of the window with soapy water, it effectively reduces the reflection to almost none. We did have to replace the melted portion of the “yard,” and we verified its effectiveness through this past season. No melting.

That said, we’re at the beach and the outside of the window gets pretty dirty. We had one panel replaced (guest damage) and it has new film on it. It’s significantly easier to see through than the other two panels which are now a bit dingy. An attempt at cleaning the grime using Windex didn’t yield much, if any change.

Foggy older left panel, clearer middle panel

And so the big question: does anybody know if a high-wind-compatible bug screen (yep, that’s a thing we need here—regular screen flaps too much in the wind and disintegrates quickly), will it be enough to prevent reflection from the window panels behind it? Does anybody have any definitive thoughts on this?