The Marketplace
The majority of homes that were built pre 1990’s have what is known as 3mm float glass for their windows. So what is 3mm float glass?
Simply put, it is just a 3mm plate of glass. In other words, if this glass was to break, it breaks in such a way that can be very dangerous. Just like sharks teeth, it’s sharp, falls out of it’s framework and can splice anything easily in half.
Further to this, float glass has virtually no thermal properties. The classic examples of this is that in Winter you can stand beside the window, with the heating on in your home, and it will feel as though you are standing next to your refrigerator with the door open.
With up to 40% of homes energy for heating lost through windows and up to 87% heat gained through windows, this can severely increase heating and cooling loads.
WERS rates the energy impact of residential and commercial windows in homes and buildings anywhere in Australia.
So what’s the solution?
Improving the thermal performance of different types of older style windows and doors requires the ripping out of the old window frames to install new ones.
The current solution is, in today’s climate, that you will need an organisation to come into your home, measure and quote. Once you accept the quote new window frames will be built for you. On the day of installation, depending on the height of your building, scaffolding may have to be erected, a technician will come in and remove your old window framing system and glass. This causes dust, noise, time delays and an unknown amount of damage to render, brickwork, gyprock, tiles and paintwork, plus an unknown additional amount of financial costs that will be in your terms and conditions.
It will take weeks before the final lick of paint will complete the whole process of your new window installation. It will require a certain number of tradesman, not just one, to complete the whole process. There will be delays, relying on different tradesmen, trying to match diaries with the compatibility for access and completion of jobs.
This has been the ONLY solution…until now.
The Modern Sensible 21st century Solution
Designed and developed by experts within the repair industry on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia, one of the harshest environments for aluminium doors and windows to function.
By removing the old glass fixed panel and the old glass sliding panel and leaving the outer good framework in its place, we have designed a Capping Framework system that slots into the old framework, covering it and using it as part of the anchoring system for the new framework, we call this CapLock.
The framework can be the colour change of your choice, the new windows that the customer has chosen can be of greater density to their desired choice, including double glazed. The glass can be tinted and, depending on the customers desire, the glass can be thermal rated and acoustic rated at the same time. You can even have a range of handle options and colours. The new framework will allow for a flyscreen or security screen and accommodate standard or block out blinds.
We have designed 2 styles of windows, in various different glass thicknesses including glazed. We have a sliding window system in various formats and we also have an awning window system in various formats. We can remove and redesign a double hung sash window in place of a sliding or awning window configuration.
The customer now has a choice.
Putting CapLock’s effectiveness into practical terms, a building can obtain an extremely high (WERS) efficiency rating at half the cost, quarter of the time and less intrusive than the traditional method of ripping out and replacing windows and doors.
One trade. One and done!
The Caplock Story
Anton Brooks, creator of Caplock Pty Ltd and highly experienced Senior Technician within the door and window repair industry, shudders when an enquiry comes through to attend a window repair because windows are five times more likely to be an unsuccessful repair. When comparing windows to doors, windows have thinner frames, a higher degree of corrosion, badly damaged tracks, dangerous float glass and require a larger variety of roller units to suit the repair to the windows.
It’s similar, but not as daunting, when we assign our technicians to do a door repair. Many of the doors that require a repair are what we call a ‘Trapped Door’. This means we need to pull the door apart because the door does not come off the track. In short, the door was never built to be repaired. The rollers are on the bottom under the frame and this means you need to ‘knock’ the side framework (Stile) off the door in order to gain access to the roller making the opportunity to break glass, longer, more difficult and expensive to repair.
In the repair business we are constantly required to come up with a plan outside of the day-to-day repair that we know, and what we teach our teams. Educating people to become a technician within the door/window repair business is expensive, time consuming and the pool in which you can find people to do this job is small and highly skilled. As Door Technicians our day-to-day work environment is constantly under review of new ways to formulate a good outcome to resolve a new problem, that in our combined team experience, we have not yet encountered.
Door/window repairs is a highly skilled job, and many people that start out as a business to provide such a service find it can break them mentally at the very moment they come across a difficult door, which is why there are not many specialist Door Technicians.
Carpenters have a similar experience with doors and windows when it comes to door and window replacement. To pull the sliding and fixed panel window off is easy but when it comes to the framework, the complications and remedial damages are unknown until you begin the ‘pull out’ of the frame that has been embedded into the wall, in most cases, longer than 30 years.
Yet there is nothing wrong with the framework. It is still waterproofed and strongly embedded.
Caplock provides a solution that balances window repairs that meets the axis of expensive window replacement. A step-by-step solution that will reduce cost, time, expenditure blowouts, remedial damage, remove the need for scaffolding, and is a quiet, dustless outcome, completed in a third of the time it takes to replace windows in the traditional method.
CapLock will allow the Strata industry and Body Corporates, to save money, save time and deal with ONE trade. The CapLock method is not rain dependent and does not require scaffolding or expensive outdoor work hoists.
CapLock has the ability to change the landscape of buying and installing new windows into homes and apartments, office blocks and factories, far more accessible and more financially attainable than anyone could have imagined.
Best of all, the design outcome is modern, sleek and inviting.
