The company was highly commended in the Innovation category of the Midlands Excellence Specialist Category awards In front of more than 1,150 business leaders at the awards ceremony – the largest event of its kind in Europe – held at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre.
Speaking after the gala ceremony, Midlands Excellence chief executive Ian Nield said: “This is a fantastic achievement for Bowater Building Products and I congratulate them wholeheartedly. We received our highest number of entries this year in the Specialist Category Awards and the standard has been nothing short of exceptional.”
This achievement comes just months after other accolades for SmartSash - the 2010 Green Apple Award and Energy Efficiency Initiative of the Year at the G10 Awards for the glass and glazing industry. The Green Apple is awarded annually by the Green Organisation to recognize those companies whose products enhance the environment and promote sustainability.
These successes confirm the company’s own belief in the product, which it believes is “one of the most significant developments in window design this century”. SmartSash is the latest development of the ground-breaking System10, itself a product that has met the ever-increasing demands of the construction industry for 25 years, and offers unique advantages to both fabricators and specifiers.
As Bowater points out, it is the only UK-manufactured PVC-U systems manufacturer to offer such exceptional thermal performance using only standard components – so no increased stocking or fabrication costs – and the only European PVC-U systems manufacturer to able to do so using a standard 70mm outerframe.
For social housing developers and providers, SmartSash provides a way to future-proof building performance against rising demands for thermal efficiency in a simple, low maintenance and cost effective manner thanks to its modular design. Using the SmartSash system, specifiers can fit PVC-U windows to currently comply with the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) Levels 3, 4 or 5 – and then easily and inexpensively upgrade them to Level 6 standard at a later date.
This innovative system provides four opportunities to fit now and upgrade windows over time and as budgets allow. At the ‘entry level’, the window features a standard 28mm double glazed unit, with thermal insert, that has a U-value of 1.2 W/m2K.
Second, a unique parting bead arrangement allows for performance enhancement with the subsequent insertion of a third, single pane to effectively create a triple-glazed installation. If the third pane is 4mm float glass, then a U-value of 1.0 W/m2K will be achieved and CSH Levels 3 and 4 will be met. Thirdly, if the float pane is replaced with a 4mm hard coat glass with an emissivity of ε0.10 for the float pane, it will achieve a U-value of 0.8 W/m2K and meet CSH Level 5.
This ‘two-plus-one’ glazing configuration not only provides cost effective triple-glazing when it is installed but also makes it cheaper and easier to replace damaged glass or failed units and simplifies the installation and maintenance of ancillaries such as internal blinds and the wiring for alarms and other security measures.
Finally, the whole glazing arrangement can be fitted with 44mm argon triple-glazed units to achieve a U- value of 0.7 W/m2K.
