The fact that "energy-saving improvements such as installing double-glazing" is still discussed as some kind of luxury in the UK 🇬🇧 never stops to amaze me 🤦♂️ I can imagine British stag party goers in Poland boasting to girls in a pub about the ultimate superiority of Great Britain: "hey sweetie, can you believe, me house even has double-glazed windows and an in-door toilet". 😂
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/69ec5550-1015-11ec-86b8-9dcf48a101ba
@kravietz exactly the same in the Netherlands. Triple glazing is also very expensive, and glaziers typically recommend against it because it is so heavy.
Double-glazed is 1.4W/m²K so it's ~4x improvement over single glazed 4.8-5.6W/m²K. At the same they are maybe only 1.3x more expensive, so I think it's still worth it.
Triple-glazed is 0.6W/m²K so it's nearly 10x improvement but on the other hand I don't think it makes much sense in a traditional (non-passive) house as heat will leak elsewhere.
Haha, as an alpinist, I was making my first money in early 90's by putting bitumic filler into holes of multi-family blocks as people literally had wind rushing through spaces between the prefabricated elements 😁
Soviet era housing, including walls and windows, had one fundamental issue — very low quality of both manufacturing and installation.
Windows were indeed double-glazed, but on wooden frame, with massive gaps.
@kravietz that actually sounds similar to some of the post-war reconstruction housing in Western Europe. Adam Curtis made one of his first documentaries about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4
The difference being that the worst of them were torn down in the 70s and 80s :)
@kravietz Even an old-style cavity wall (which I suspect is common in the UK) filled with insulation will have a U-value around 0.5W/m²K, so the window is still likely to be the coldest surface.
I've been told that in Eastern Europe, triple (and even quadruple!) glazing is quite common, even on Communist-era apartment blocks that can't have been built by detail-obsessed environmentalists.