A 650 kg Double Glazed Panel Replaced at a Connewarre Home

A home on the golf course estate at Connewarre lost the biggest piece of glass in the house. A double glazed panel three metres high and four and a half metres wide, six hundred and fifty kilograms of it, spanning the whole lounge wall.

The insurance company rang us. We were there the same day.

This one ran in two parts, months apart, because a panel this size does not exist on a shelf anywhere in the country. Part one was making it safe. Part two was putting the new one in with a crane.

Watch the new panel go in

This is the replacement panel coming off the truck and being walked into position. It is the clearest thirty seconds of the whole job, so it is worth watching before reading the rest.

Part 1: The Make Safe

Toughened glass that lets go does not fall out of the frame in one piece and it does not drop to the floor like a broken window. It crazes into thousands of small interlocked pieces and stays roughly where it was, held together by nothing more than friction and the frame around the edges.

What it loses completely is stiffness. A sheet of toughened glass is rigid right up until the moment it is not, and then it behaves like a very heavy blanket. On a small panel that does not matter much. On a panel this size, with this much mass in it, gravity starts winning immediately.

The couch was holding it up

This is the part that got our attention when we walked in.

The glass had already started coming inward. Not falling, sagging, the way a sheet of chain mail sags. And what was stopping it going any further was the back of the couch that ran the full length of the window.

You can see it in that photo. The glass is not sitting flat in the frame any more, it is bowed into the room and leaning on the furniture. Nobody put the couch there for that reason. It just happened to be the thing in the way.

That is a very bad thing to be relying on. A couch is not a prop, it is not fixed to anything, and the moment somebody sat down heavily or dragged it out to clean behind it, six hundred and fifty kilograms of loose glass would have come into the room.

Film first, then move the furniture

So the order of work mattered. Film first, furniture second.

We ran safety film across the full face of the glass, edge to edge, which bonds the crazed pieces into a single sheet again and gives the panel back enough integrity to hold its own weight in the frame. That is what the first photo is, taping and filming the panel off the back of the couch that was holding it.

Only once it was filmed and secure did the couch come out. If you move the furniture first you have taken away the only thing supporting the glass while you are standing right in front of it.

Then the couch and the rest of the furniture went back, well clear of the window, so that nothing was against the glass and nothing was going to get destroyed if the panel did let go later. A room with a compromised panel in it should have nothing valuable and nobody sitting within falling distance of it.

Then we measured it, wrote it up and sent the quote to the insurer.

A make safe that had to last months

Most make safes hold for a few days. This one was done in early February and the new panel went in in the middle of May.

That is not the insurer dragging their feet. That is how long it takes to get approval and then have a unit this size actually manufactured. It is worth saying plainly, because it changes what a make safe has to be. If the film is only expected to hold until Friday you can be casual about it. If it has to hold through a summer and an autumn, through heat, cold and the panel expanding and contracting every single day, it has to be done properly the first time.

Part 2: The Replacement

Once the claim was approved we went looking for someone who could actually build the panel.

Viridian were the only manufacturer we could find with the plant to make a double glazed unit at three metres by four and a half. It is not a matter of cutting a bigger piece. Every stage, the toughening furnace, the sealing line, the handling gear between them, has to physically fit a sheet that size, and very few places are set up for it.

It could not come on our truck either. It went on Viridian's own delivery truck, because of the size and because six hundred and fifty kilograms of glass in one sheet is its own transport problem.

What is actually in the panel

The unit is 10 mm clear toughened on the inside, a spacer, and 10 mm grey toughened on the outside.

That asymmetry is deliberate and it is a genuinely good bit of design. From inside you are looking through clear glass, so the view out is the real colour it is meant to be, no grey cast over it. From outside the grey leaf does two jobs at once. It cuts a lot of the heat before it ever reaches the room, which matters enormously on a wall of this size, and it makes the glass read as dark and reflective from the outside so you cannot see into the lounge.

Clear view out, privacy and heat control in. You only get that by putting the tint on the outer leaf and leaving the inner one clear.

Rigging it

A panel this heavy is not a manual handling job at any crew size. We brought in our large scale crane contacts and worked with Jason at ACL Cranes on the lift.

That is the eight cup vacuum lifter rigged to the crane hook, with the Viridian truck behind it. The lifter spreads the load across eight pads so no single point is taking too much, and it lets the panel be rotated and walked into the opening under control rather than muscled.

The damaged panel came out first, still filmed, which is exactly why filming it properly in February mattered. A crazed panel that has been held together as one sheet can be lifted out as one sheet. One that has not been filmed comes out as a landslide.

New panel in, lifter still attached while it was packed and checked square. You can see the grey outer leaf doing its job already in that photo, reflecting the garden back at you.

Sealing it up

Then the silicone work, inside and out. This is the pair of photos worth looking at together, because they are the same panel taken minutes apart from opposite sides.

From the inside, clear. The truck, the grass, the trees, all their proper colour. That is the point of the clear inner leaf.

From the outside, dark grey and reflective, with Ash's own reflection in it. Same piece of glass, same moment, completely different from each side.

What to do if a big panel goes at your place

Keep everyone away from it and do not move furniture that is touching it. As this job shows, the thing leaning against the glass may be the only thing holding it, and pulling it away is the worst possible first move. Take the photo from a safe distance instead.

Do not wait to see if it gets worse. Toughened glass that has crazed is not going to recover. It is going to keep sagging, and the bigger the panel the faster that happens.

Ring your insurer, and tell them you want it made safe now rather than at the same visit as the replacement. Those are two different jobs on very different timelines, and the gap between them can be months on a panel that has to be purpose made. We are happy to deal with the insurer directly, which is what happened here, and there is more on how we work with insurers and builders on our insurance glazing page.

Send us a photo of the whole opening, standing back far enough to get the full frame and whatever is in front of it, plus your suburb. On a panel like this the photo tells us the access, the height and what gear has to come, which is most of the quote.

We have written up a few others in this line of work, including a third storey double glazed unit in Lorne and a balustrade panel that let go on a balcony. There is more on unit make ups on our glass types page, and more on the lifting gear we run in house on our equipment page.