How does aluminum in 7016 perform with large south-facing window areas in summer? No cracking?
I don’t recall any customer complaints on this subject, although "in my time in the industry" the 7016 hype was already in full swing. But a dream couple are intense sunlight and near-black tones in general—notably more so with wood-aluminum than with plastic.
Could you outline the advantages over plastic for the McDonalds faction among the forum members that, in your opinion, justify the demanded price premium?
It’s the other way round: what justifies plastic’s comparatively small price discount? – which is only about 20% for good quality windows, even though most people’s price-performance expectations are shaped differently (because the plastic component market is dominated by DIY store and discount offers).
At the company headquarters, we installed our own products that after more than thirty years still looked like new. The plastic windows I know only look—although new barely distinguishable to the naked eye—after fifteen to twenty years up close as if someone had cleaned their frames with abrasive cleanser.
Or are there plastic windows that you don’t consider „McDiscount“?
I find those from Gealan good. They are not foil-wrapped but have their color layer "melted on".
What do you think is the reason why 90% of consumers have preferred plastic windows for decades and what can an aluminum manufacturer learn and improve from that?
I wouldn’t want to learn anything from that. Audi isn’t better than Seat, but is more expensive because they want customers with more money. I would never want to push plastic to single-family home builders: simply because that is a price-seeker market segment. You don’t make money there, you only exchange it.
That so many people want plastic windows has "historical" reasons, and these are as myth-based as the preference for solid constructions from home-slaughtered rural bricks.
About fifty years ago, the window market restructured, people wanted to move away from wood: the very close relation between maintenance and durability there was considered annoying. Aluminum windows of the construction type back then had a design flaw: they still had no separation between outer and inner profile side. Due to good thermal conductivity, many people then internalized the experience that aluminum profiles felt ice-cold in winter. Also, this caused condensation on the panes of the also still new double glazing.
Two materials did not have these problems: expensive woods from Scandinavia and tropical regions, and plastic. In the 1980s, demand for tropical woods then collapsed. What remained was plastic. It was also to plastic’s advantage that plastic processing was familiar to joiners who therefore did not have to give up the window construction business despite the material change.
Meanwhile, the desire for wood interior sides is growing stronger again, for the sake of warm-natural coziness tralala. But please without needing to paint, so weather-resistant. Aluminum sheets as a protective layer are seen as the solution. Unfortunately, this only "works" at discounter-corrupted prices if the aluminum protection is misused to use wood qualities unsuitable for window construction by themselves. But the consumer, as always, must first learn that by their own wallet.
