The main types of insulated glass spacer explained

Insulated glass spacer bars can be rigid or flexible. Many are ‘warm edge’ – and some (although less and less as time goes by) aren’t.
In this blog, we’re going to take you through the different spacer types in more detail!

Warm edge

Spacers are tiny, little known outside the glazing industry – but hugely important.

Far from just separating the panes of glass in an IGU, they’re vital to ensuring the finished windows deliver exceptional thermal and acoustic performance.

Spacers have actually been around for far longer than you might think. They were first patented in Victorian times, using wood or rope in the earliest double-glazed windows.

By the late twentieth century when double-glazing really took off, the vast majority were made of metal – a cheap and acceptable solution for separating the panes, but one that still had flaws.

The biggest concerned thermal efficiency. Metal conducts heat – and that means that windows made with metal spacers very quickly let the warm out, and the cold in. Draughty homes and higher heating bills were the result.

‘Warm edge’ technology rectifies that. By using highly-advanced plastics and foam rubbers rather than metal, warm edge spacers – like Edgetech’s pioneering Super Spacer® which has been in continual use for over thirty years – were able to offer vastly better performance.

It’s no surprise that, today, warm edge spacers have become the norm.

Rigid

Warm edge or otherwise, spacer bars come in two broad types – rigid and flexible.

Rigid spacers, like Edgetech’s TruPlas®, have several advantages – they offer improved thermal performance over metal spacer bars, and companies can switch to them from their metal counterparts easily, using their existing machinery.

TruPlas is made of high-performing glass-reinforced thermoplastic, and has delivered stability and thermal efficiency for homes all around the world.

Flexibility

Flexible spacers like Super Spacer have far more versatility, however. Their flexible design means they can be used to easily create unconventionally-shaped units, freeing up architects to be as bold and ambitious as they like.

It’s Super Spacer® Triseal™, for example, that’s in the over four-thousand irregularly-shaped IGUs that make up Dubai’s The Opus tower, one of the world’s most striking and complex buildings.

Its matt material finish means that it blends in with all window colours too, offering homeowners and architects alike seamless aesthetics.

Another key strength of a quality flexible spacer is its memory. In parts of the world where strong winds or fluctuating temperatures are the norm, IGUs are put under a lot of pressure.

Super Spacer’s 100% memory means that no matter how much an IGU expands or contracts under pressure, it will always return to its original position, but is flexible enough to move with the glass which reduces the stress on the glass edge.

Super Spacer isn’t just suited for grand feats of architecture, however – its exceptional strength, reliability and performance have seen it used in millions of households all over the world.

Our flexible spacer range also includes Duralite – a durable, single-seal, high-performance product that can be applied in a single step for outstanding thermal performance and cost effective volume manufacturing.

More advances around the corner

So those are the core types of spacer. They’ve been around for a very long time now.

But even so, we’re still seeing gradual advances in technology.

At Edgetech, we’re currently working on no less than three innovative new spacer bar products.

The first, Edgetherm RS, is nearly ready to release. It’s a rigid spacer that’s designed to address one of the most common issues affecting rigid spacer IGU’s – PIB migration.

When windows are subject to the kind of pressures we talked about earlier – stormy weather, temperatures that go from very high to very low over a short space of time, and so on – the pumping action this causes can squeeze the PIB into the unit.

With Edgetherm RS, however, this doesn’t happen. If pumping does occur, special grooves channel the PIB towards the unseen edge of the unit rather than into the sightline – avoiding those tell-tale wavy lines on the inside of the unit.

We’re also working on a number of revolutionary new flexible designs, too – so watch this space!

And in the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about any of our innovative spacer products, don’t hesitate to get in touch!