Mysterious Broken Interior Window Pane

tickle · Jun 10, 2007, 04:46 PM

Somebody is not telling you the whole story.

glavine · Jun 10, 2007, 07:34 PM

Id Have To Agree With Tickle , There Had To Be Another Cause, If The Glass Had Been Defective you'd Noticed A Seal Failure, Fog in between The Glass.
It Is Odd

Ignatiusreily · Jul 20, 2007, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evinx

We have Pella double pane windows - the interior pane is removable.

A few nights ago (around 2am), the interior pane in a guest bedroom suddenly exploded/broke into a million pieces. No one was in the room and the entire house was empty. In fact, no one had been in that guestroom for weeks. The exterior pane is fine, no damage whatsover.

What would cause a window to suddently break like that? It was nearly 3 years old. Any ideas? Could this happen on othjer windows? We only learned about it from the alarm company glass break sensor going off.

THIS HAPPENED TO ME! My girlfriend and I were staying at a friends vacation home in the Vail Valley and when we got ready to leave a double pane window by the front door was broken. Inside pane only. Nothing could have hit it. The guys who replaced the window told the owner that it was broken by an impact from the inside. So now our friend thinks we did something to cause it.

Did you ever get any other information?

Unregistered · Apr 2, 2008, 10:28 AM

I have 5 windows that have broken this way. I have no answer, they were not hit from inside. Does anyone have an answer?

Evinx1130 · Apr 2, 2008, 10:39 AM

All I learned is that the glass is tempered to give it strength. However, sometimes there is a flaw in the tempering process - or perhaps the glass gets a short but deep scratch in handling or installation -- and this will create the defect in the tempering. Under some stress (could be heat or rapid temperature change etc), the glass will break. That is what happened to me. When I spoke with Pella, they said occasionally this happens - but they did not go into details (I am sure the window mfrs worry about lawsuits). This used to happen with glass eyeglass lenses but nowdays, they are all plastic - it is simply much safer. Hope this helps.

amricca · Apr 2, 2008, 10:52 AM

It could be thermal stress glass breakage.

CBD-129. Potential for Thermal Breakage of Sealed Double-GlazingUnits - NRC-IRC

BTW - This post is from July 2007

ballengerb1 · Apr 2, 2008, 04:36 PM

So this is not a thermopane window, right? Was the frame of the broken window still easy to remove, no binding?

gpierson · Dec 20, 2008, 08:43 PM

I am the property manager of a large church in Chicago. I've had two large thermo panes (21x36 inches) mysteriously break on me in a single week (the breaks happened 3 days apart). ONly the interior pane. Not the exterior. When the first one happened, I was certain someone broke it by mistake and simply didn't want to tell me.

When the 2nd one broke, I realized something else was going on. Nobody was in the building when the 2nd one broke.

The only thing I can think of as the cause is the extreme temp changes. 10 degress outside, 70 inside. BUt this still doesn't make sense. Isn't the window designed for this?

The other possibility is radiators are located directly below the windows, about 30 inches below. Maybe the heat caused this?

Lastly, on the 2nd break, someone turned off the heat to the building and forgot to turn it back on. When I found this, I turned the heat back on to 60 degrees. The interior temp had dropped to 47 degrees. When I cranked the heat back up, maybe this casued the break. But the only strange thing is the 1st break occurred when the interior temp never dropped below 65.

Barnbrat · Dec 12, 2009, 10:50 AM

I just had the inside pane of my window break last night, while I was asleep. The window is right by my bed and fairly inaccessible. Someone would have to throw something at it to reach it, but nothing was there. It cracked loud enough to awaken me at 1:00 am. There has been a cold spell outside. Could that do it? I'm thankful the glass didn't fall out, or it would've broken right over my head! The windows are only about 2 years old. We were all sleeping, so I know no one did this.

Mysterious Broken Interior Window Pane

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