Professional specifications, installation guide & design solutions
Vacuum-sealed glass provides exceptional insulation without gas. Thin profile with superior thermal performance for modern designs.. Modern, efficient design with excellent weather protection. Perfect for residential and commercial applications, these glass are specified for the application rather than chosen from a catalogue. Professional installation ensures optimal performance and longevity.
Glass is supplied from the primary manufacturers and processed to your specification:
Tell us the coating, thickness and make-up you need, or describe the problem and we will specify it. Collection from Staten Island is available by appointment.
Proper installation is critical for optimal performance. Our licensed contractors provide:
Installation includes sealing and flashing the perimeter of the opening, because a window is only as watertight as the junction between it and the building. Where an opening needs more than that — a failed sill, damaged masonry, a detail that was wrong to begin with — see waterproofing.
Every insulating glass unit is trying to slow three things: conduction, convection and radiation. Conventional double and triple glazing attacks the first two by putting a thick gas-filled cavity between the panes — argon or krypton, chosen because they conduct less readily than air. Vacuum insulated glazing takes a different route. It removes the gas entirely.
Two panes are held roughly 0.1 to 0.2 millimetres apart by an almost invisible grid of micro-pillars, the cavity is pumped down to a hard vacuum on the order of 0.1 pascal, and the perimeter is hermetically sealed for the life of the unit. Because a vacuum carries essentially no conduction and no convection, that wafer-thin gap does the work of a far thicker gas-filled one. A low-e coating handles the remaining radiant heat.
The consequence is the headline figure: a complete vacuum unit can be as thin as 8.3 mm overall. A standard double-glazed unit is 24 to 28 mm. Triple glazing is commonly 40 mm or more.
This matters commercially and it is rarely explained, so it is worth being blunt about it.
The original generation of vacuum glazing uses a glass frit edge seal, fired at roughly 380 to 450 °C. That temperature is high enough to relax the temper in toughened glass, which constrains the design and forces a denser pillar array. Classic frit-sealed vacuum glass performs at around 1.1 W/m²K — about the same as good modern double glazing. Its advantage is achieving that in a quarter of the thickness, not beating it outright.
Tempered vacuum glazing changed the picture. Low-temperature edge seals let the glass stay fully toughened, which allows a sparser pillar grid and cuts the residual heat path. Products in this class quote 0.4 to 0.5 W/m²K, against roughly 0.6 W/m²K for the best triple glazing. In the U-factor units used on NFRC labels here, 0.4 W/m²K is approximately 0.07.
Hybrid units bond a vacuum pane into a conventional gas-filled sealed unit — effectively a triple-glazed unit where one cavity is a vacuum. These reach 0.4 to 0.5 W/m²K with a further pane of acoustic and solar benefit, at the cost of thickness.
So "vacuum glass" on a quotation is not a specification. Ask which type, and ask for the U-value.
Vacuum glazing generally runs three to five times the price of ordinary double glazing. That is a real gap and clients are entitled to know what they are paying for. Five things drive it.
The seal has to be perfect, permanently. A conventional sealed unit that loses a little argon still works as a double-glazed window. A vacuum unit that loses its vacuum is just two panes of glass with a hair's gap between them. There is no partial failure mode, so the hermetic seal has to be right first time and stay right for decades. Seal materials frequently contain silver.
Evacuation is slow. Pumping a cavity down to 0.1 pascal and holding it while the seal is formed is not a process that can be rushed, and each unit occupies equipment for far longer than a sealed unit spends on a line.
Every size is a setup. The pillar array is applied to the glass, and on many production methods each size requires its own screen or tooling. A one-off window carries a setup cost that a repeat size does not.
Scrap is expensive. A unit that fails its vacuum test late in the process has already absorbed the glass, the coating, the pillars, the seal and the machine time. That loss is carried in the price of the units that pass.
Volume is small. Conventional IGU manufacture is a mature industry running at enormous scale. Vacuum glazing is not, and the economics reflect it.
Against that, weigh what it replaces. Reaching a comparable U-value conventionally means triple glazing, which means a 40 mm unit, substantially more weight, deeper frames, heavier hardware and often a larger structural opening. In a new building that may be the cheaper route. In an existing building where the frame depth is fixed, it frequently is not possible at all.
Historic and landmarked buildings. This is the strongest case. A 24 mm double glazed unit will not fit the rebate of an original timber sash, and forcing the issue means rebuilding or replacing the sash — which in a historic district is exactly what the approval is trying to prevent. At 8.3 mm, vacuum glazing can be putty-glazed into an original rebate. You keep the sash, the profile and the sightlines the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved, and you get modern thermal performance behind them. There is no other way to achieve both.
Weight-constrained openings. A vacuum unit weighs far less than a triple-glazed one of the same size, which matters on a double-hung sash running on balances sized for single glazing, and on any large operable panel.
Acoustics. Sound needs a medium. A vacuum is a poor one, and vacuum glazing performs notably well against airborne noise for its thickness. The pillars and the edge seal do conduct some sound, so it is not silence — but relative to 8 mm of glass it is remarkable.
Deep energy retrofit. Where the target is a very low whole-building heat loss and the windows cannot get thicker, vacuum glazing is often the only glazing that reaches the number.
The edge seal is a thermal bridge. The rigid perimeter conducts, so the centre-of-glass figure is better than the whole-unit figure. On small panes the edge is a larger proportion of the area and the advantage narrows. Ask for whole-window numbers, not centre-of-glass.
The pillars are a residual heat path. They are the reason the U-value is not lower still.
Thermal expansion stresses the seal. A rigid hermetic seal between two panes at different temperatures is under genuine stress, and that stress is greatest in severe cold. It is a known engineering consideration rather than a defect, but it is why seal quality is not a place to economise.
It cannot be cut or modified. Every unit is made to final size. A measurement error is a replacement, not an adjustment.
The pillars are visible if you look. At roughly ten centimetres and focusing, you see a faint grid of specks. At normal viewing distance they disappear. Most clients stop noticing within a day, but anyone paying this much should be shown a sample first.
Clients ask whether vacuum glazing gets a house to net zero or Passive House standard. The honest answer is that glazing is necessary but not sufficient.
Windows are usually the weakest element in a thermal envelope, so improving them from a U-value near 1.1 to one near 0.4 is a large reduction in heat loss through that element. On a house with a lot of glass, it is the single biggest available improvement. But the walls, the roof, the floor, the air tightness of the whole building, the thermal bridges at junctions and the heating system all continue to do whatever they were doing. A certified standard is a whole-building calculation, not a glazing specification.
What vacuum glazing does is remove an obstacle that is otherwise immovable: it lets a building reach a very low window U-value without changing the frames. In a historic house, or any building where the openings cannot be enlarged and the sashes cannot be replaced, that is often the difference between a deep retrofit being possible and not.
Anyone quoting you a percentage energy saving from the glass alone is guessing. What we will do is tell you what the glazing element will achieve and where the remaining losses are.
This is a premium product and it is specified where either the performance target or the constraint justifies it. The following describe the kind of property and problem it fits.
Large detached houses on generous lots, exposed on all four elevations with no neighbouring buildings to shelter them, and typically with substantial glazed areas. Whole-house heat loss is the issue rather than one wall, and the glazing is a large share of it.
Where these are new or comprehensively renovated, triple glazing is viable because frames can be specified deep enough to take it. Where an existing house has good windows in the wrong performance class, vacuum glazing upgrades the glass without rebuilding the openings.
The highest ground on the eastern seaboard south of Maine, which means genuine wind exposure on a hillside with mature tree cover and large properties. Older substantial houses here often have windows worth keeping — leaded lights, shaped heads, timber sashes with profiles nobody manufactures now.
That is precisely the vacuum glazing case. The alternative is replacing joinery that is part of the character of the house in order to fit a thicker unit.
Oceanfront and near-oceanfront estates, with three things acting at once: severe wind exposure, salt, and very large areas of glass facing the water because the view is the entire point.
Vacuum glazing suits this because it reaches a high thermal performance without the weight of a triple unit — useful on large operable panels — and because the thin profile keeps sightlines slender on a facade designed around the view. Note that the hermetic edge seal is a rigid assembly, so the frame, fixings and perimeter detailing want the same care we describe on our waterproofing page for coastal work.
Substantial detached and semi-detached houses, many with significant original detail and a strong tradition of maintaining it. The typical brief here is improving comfort and running cost without altering how the house looks from the street.
Vacuum glazing answers that directly, because the change is inside the glass rather than in the frame profile. A window can be upgraded and still read exactly as it did.
The landmarked brownstone districts are the clearest application in the whole city. In a designated historic district the sash profile, the muntin width and the sightlines are governed by the approval, and a conventional insulating unit will not fit an original rebate.
Vacuum glazing is one of the few routes to a genuinely low U-value inside an approved historic sash. We cover the approval process on our Carroll Gardens landmark window page.
Fieldston is a designated historic district of large early twentieth-century houses, and Riverdale carries similar stock. Colder winters than the coastal boroughs, substantial houses, original joinery worth preserving — the same combination that makes the case elsewhere, with the thermal argument slightly stronger.
Tell us the sash or frame depth you have to work within, the opening sizes, and whether the building is in a historic district. We will tell you whether vacuum glazing is the right answer or whether a conventional unit will do the job for less — because on a building where the frames can simply be deeper, it often will. We supply and install across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.
Get a custom quote for your vacuum-glass window project today
