Serious Materials to upgrade windows in Empire State Building

Published: 05-Mar-2010

Johnson Controls, a provider of energy efficient and sustainable products, services and solutions, has selected Serious Materials to super-insulate more than 6,500 windows for the Empire State Building’s energy efficiency retrofit project.

Serious Materials will provide its SeriousGlass technology through a sustainable production process that will directly reduce energy costs by more than $400,000 per year. In a first-of-its-kind process, Serious Materials will reuse all existing glass and create super-insulating glass units (IGUs) in a dedicated processing space located in the Empire State Building. The new IGUs then will be re-installed and will increase the thermal performance of the windows by up to four times their current thermal performance, improving the R-value of the older dual pane IGUs from R2 to R-values ranging from R-5 to R-8. The super-insulating new windows will also reduce solar heat gain by more than 50% compared to the older windows.

Johnson Controls is overseeing the full Empire State Building retrofit project, with a team of energy efficiency experts including the Clinton Climate Initiative, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Rocky Mountain Institute. The window upgrade process is one of eight individual measures that are expected to reduce energy use by 38 percent, save $4.4 million per year in energy costs, and save 105,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next 15 years.

As part of Serious Materials’ solution, a 5,000 square feet processing space will be built onsite in the Empire State Building and will serve as the production line for super-insulating SeriousGlass glass units. The existing glass of the building’s 6,514 double-hung windows will be removed from the window frames, separated, and cleaned in the processing space. New super-insulating IGUs will be produced using the old glass panes, new spacers, suspended coated film, and special gas fill. The IGUs will be re-installed into the existing window frames.

Removal and re-installation of glass will occur during evening hours to avoid any disruption to building tenants and occupants. Serious Materials also will install the company’s QuietRock soundproof drywall in the processing space to protect neighboring tenants from noise during construction.

By reusing existing glass and producing the new glass on-site, the process eliminates virtually all waste, saves energy, and reduces replacement costs.

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