Installing Windows in Your Home

Posted on: 28 November 2018

Aluminium has been used in the construction industry since the late nineteenth century. Its low-corrosion and lightweight properties meant that it tended to be put to use in structural situations at first. However, its silvery finish and high levels of tensile strength meant that it soon became a material that was favoured by architects for framing glazing. You can see it used extensively in the windows of early skyscrapers built in New York in the first half of the twentieth century, for example.

In fact, window manufacturers often prefer it because it is so easy to extrude into different frame profiles that can be used to hold double and treble-glazed panes with a great deal of reliability. In what ways is aluminium used these days to frame glazing products?

Entrance Doors

All sorts of glazed entrance doors are made from aluminium nowadays. You can purchase standard sizes of front door, for example, which are either fully or semi-glazed and which often contain frosted glass for a little privacy. Glazed shop entrances often have tough aluminium frames which allow you to see through fully but which offer a great deal of tamper resistance so that criminals are put off of trying to force them open. These days, many people install bi-folding doors in their homes with floor-to-ceiling glazing. Only aluminium offers the level of tensile strength to reliably hold the large panes of glass needed in these products and to provide the necessary degree of security.

For more information about different kinds of entrance doors, contact a door retailer.

Windows

Aluminium-framed windows are increasingly commonplace in domestic situations in Australia. This is because aluminium is virtually maintenance-free and you only have to wipe it down to keep it in mint condition. This makes the material good for hard-to-reach windows, such as those set into the roofline of a structure. Furthermore, aluminium frames can be fitted with thermal break technologies, usually some form of plastic insert, which means they don't act like little radiators, transferring the sun's energy into your home.

Curtain Walls

A favourite of architects designing civic buildings, curtain walls are large expanses of glazing that are used to create semi-external places, often connected to atria or placed on the outside of a building to 'wrap it up'. Since the 1970s when curtain walls first became fashionable, aluminium has been the framing material of choice for these architectural elements. The reason is that the metal can be mixed easily with others to make specific alloys which have the exact properties needed for them to be engineered to form these large structures.