Three Storeys Up in Lorne, the Inside Pane Was the One That Broke

A window on the third storey of a home in Lorne let go on its own. No impact, nobody near it. The glass simply failed and cracked through, three levels up, on a wall that looks straight out over the water.

It is a double glazed unit, so there are two panes with a sealed air gap between them. The one that broke was the inner pane, the one facing into the room.

The lucky part was which pane broke

That detail is the whole story of this job.

The inner pane broke into a sheet of held together fragments with the outer pane and the frame still around it, so everything stayed where it was. The mess was contained to one room, and the room could be closed off.

Had it been the outer pane, that glass had nothing in front of it and three storeys of nothing below it. Broken glass coming off a third floor onto a driveway and entry path is a very different afternoon, and a very different conversation with the neighbours.

Toughened glass failing on its own is not as rare as people think. We wrote up a balcony balustrade panel that did the same thing not long ago. Tiny impurities from manufacture, or damage to an edge, sit there for years until the tension in the glass finds them.

The first visit is about making it safe

We attended and secured the broken pane with safety film before anything else. The film bonds across the face of the glass and holds the fragments together, so a pane that is already broken stays as one piece rather than deciding to let go of itself while somebody walks past it.

That matters more at height than it does at ground level. It buys the time to do the rest of the job properly, rather than improvising a repair on the day because the glass cannot be left as it is.

With the pane stable, the unit was measured and ordered, and the access equipment was booked for the day it arrived.

Getting to a third storey window

On a job like this the glass is often the straightforward part. The question is how you get a person and a sealed unit up to a third floor window safely, on a sloping coastal driveway, without taking the whole street out of action.

We used a trailer mounted elevated work platform. It tows in behind a vehicle, sets up on outriggers on the driveway, and lifts an operator to the window with the glass. No scaffold to build and dismantle over several days, no working off a ladder at a height where nobody should be working off a ladder.

The base gets bollarded off so nobody wanders underneath while there is glass overhead. It is a small thing that takes five minutes and removes the one risk you cannot control, which is other people.

A broken pane means a new unit

This is the part that surprises people about double glazing. You cannot replace just the broken pane.

A double glazed unit is a sealed assembly, two panes bonded to a spacer with the cavity sealed at the factory. Once it is made it is one component. Break either pane and the whole unit is replaced, which is why a double glazed repair takes longer and costs more than a single pane in the same opening.

It also means the replacement has to be made to match, so the new unit performs the same way as the rest of the windows around it rather than becoming the odd one out on the wall.

Back to a view

The new unit went in from the platform, and the room went back to being a room with a view rather than a room with a cracked window and the blinds down.

If a window has broken at height

Do not try to take it out yourself, and do not leave it open to the weather while you decide. A cracked pane at height is stable until it is disturbed, and the two things that disturb it are wind and well meaning attempts to tidy it up.

Send us a photo of the window from inside and, if you can do it safely, one from outside showing the whole wall. That second photo tells us what access the job needs, and access is usually what decides how quickly we can be there.

We cover Lorne, Aireys Inlet, Anglesea and the Great Ocean Road as part of our normal run out from Geelong.