On June 30, the Florida Building Code’s 5th Edition went into effect. One of the biggest changes involves dropping the prescriptive solar heat gain coefficient for residential windows from 0.30 to 0.25.
The code changes have many in the industry wondering if the cost of windows in Florida will be going up. The answer? Not necessarily.
“If you can replace a window with monolithic glass, that will be a lower cost than with low-E IG,” says Dean Ruark, PE, PGT Industries. “However, it’s typically not a significant cost addition. What’s required is commonly used in the marketplace, and becoming more common in Florida as a market trend and consumer need, even without the code requiring it.”
The prices of windows aren’t going up at NewSouth.
“We’ve had these windows that meet the code since day one,” says Earl Rahn, president. He adds that the company, which has four locations in Florida, sells the same windows in all its locations. “We just entered the southeast Florida market [West Palm Beach], and we use the same windows there that we put in everyone else’s home in Florida.”
Rahn is thrilled that his company will no longer “be competing with the low-priced, non-energy-efficient window.”
For more about the code changes in Florida, see the June/July issue of DWM, which is now available.