Budget planning for second house construction - experiences

Do you mean windows made entirely of aluminum? We have plastic windows with an external aluminum shell. It cost us just over €2000 extra for 16 windows. Four of them are floor-to-ceiling. An external foil covering would have cost us about €1000. It was a local provider, Illerplastic. I’m also from the area. Wood-aluminum windows are, of course, something different. I imagine windows made entirely of aluminum are complicated because of the thermal separation, like with aluminum front doors. But I don’t know how common aluminum windows are.

We have very large windows and also very many of them All floor-to-ceiling, mostly fixed glazing but also some doors and sliding doors. We also initially thought of pure aluminum, but ultimately decided against it due to the enormous price difference... Aluminum was about 40% more expensive than wood in our offers. Wood-aluminum would have been somewhere in the middle.

If you need guideline prices for certain window sizes, just send me a private message, and I'll look up our offers

So we also planned wood-aluminum windows for our new build. However, I immediately had the same ones quoted in plastic as well, since I wasn't quite sure if the extra cost for wood-aluminum is worth it for us.

The plastic windows are about 53,000 and the wood-aluminum with pine wood about 72,000, so roughly a 35% difference. If you want other woods like oak, for example, it obviously gets even more expensive.

Full aluminum is certainly great in terms of durability and torsional stiffness, but is it worth it? Definitely not visually.

We are not used to the prices yet.
Of course, plastic is taken into account for comparison. But we try to limit ourselves to a few windows, and only where it makes sense, floor-to-ceiling + sliding door.
Maybe we'll look at plastic references when the time comes.

Off-topic about plastic...
As I said, about nine years ago we had bad experience with plastic dark foil on the outside. (The profile is from the largest German manufacturer)…

Repeatedly complained, not tight, warped… never ending story. Glass panes reclotted multiple times, fittings changed multiple times… conclusion: during the first heating in summer, the plastic profile warped significantly.
The cause is probably the combination of:
- large wide floor-to-ceiling windows
- dark foil on the outside
- only double glazing

According to the dealer or producer from the REGION, we are of course a one-off case.
Acquaintances - coincidentally - chose the same dealer about a year later, with the same problems on the same profile, but with triple glazing instead of double.
So these are our plastic experiences :-(