Adding windows to your carriage-style garage door design, not only lets natural light into your garage but it also adds warmth and curb appeal to your home. Glass goes a long way to making your garage feel like an extension of your home, instead of a stand-alone space.
While standard clear panes are a popular choice, many homeowners lean towards specialty glass for garage doors, including frosted, glacier, and seeded glass, to increase the curb appeal of their home.
What is Specialty Glass for Garage Doors?
The easy answer is any type of glass that is not standard, double strength clear glass. Glass is an amazing material and comes is a large variety of designs that make choosing one type more complex than expected.
Specialty window glass can have one or more of these features:
- have a color (or tint)
- be reflective
- have a texture or pattern
- be obscure or more opaque
- be tempered (4x stronger than standard glass)
- be laminated
- be insulated
- be Low-E (low emissivity) glass
Major Considerations When Choosing Glass for a Garage Door
Looks
Most often, a type of glass is selected because of they way it looks. Unique characteristics can complement your home and add to your curb appeal. Textured glass can be an easy way to up the design impact of your door and the choices are almost endless. Etched, seeded, and hammered are very popular choices of glass.
Security & Privacy
Window glass does a wonderful job of letting light into the garage space. However, it also lets people see what’s in your garage. Textured and even colored glass can obscure the view through your windows, while still letting in natural light.
How do home invaders choose which homes to target? Certainly, they are more confident to enter a home when the residents are away. A quick peek through your garage door windows will show an empty garage which signifies an empty home. Many homeowners resort to applying an opaque film to their garage door windows, but using a film doesn’t always have the best looking results. When you’re purchasing a high-end garage door, you want high-end glass options.
As you review your options for adding specialty glass in your carriage-style garage door design, consider glacier, hammered, or seeded glass styles. Other obscured and more opaque glass options will obstruct visibility and still provide an aesthetically pleasing result.
Safety
The location and size of the glass area in your garage doors should also be a consideration. The larger the glass area and/or the lower to the ground the glass area is, the more important it is to understand how glass breaks. Most glass breaks into large, sharp, jagged pieces when hit. Tempered glass, which is is 4x stronger than ordinary glass, stands up to small dings and hits without breaking, just like your car windshield. When tempered shatters, it breaks into smaller, granular, interlocked pieces, often in a spider-web pattern, which is not as sharp as broken glass.
Laminated glass is both a safety and security option, which is important when you consider that in almost 10% of home invasions, the home’s garage is the point of entry. Laminated glass contains a layer of plastic that keeps all broken pieces in place, making it safer. Additionally, the plastic also makes it harder to actually break through, which may help to prevent a break-in.
Insulation & Heat Gain
Keep in mind that glass is not a good insulator and garages are typically not heated spaces. Usually, garage interior walls have been insulated to minimize any temperature impact on your home. If your garage door is an insulated door or your garage is a conditioned space, there are specialty glass for garage doors that can help with heating and cooler concerns.
- Insulated glass
- Reflective glass
- Low-E (Low Emissivity) Glass
