LESLIE: To tint or not to tint. That is the question Bill in Delaware has.
Bill, you want to tint some windows? What are you working on?
BILL: Hi, how y’all doing? Thanks for having me on today.
TOM: You’re very welcome. So what’s going on with those windows?
BILL: Well, what I have is I have an older home, 130 years old, and I have radiator heat through the whole house. So I don’t have a forced air system; so, really, air conditioning isn’t an alternative for me.
LESLIE: Ooh.
TOM: Well, no. You’re saying air conditioning is not an alternative? Air conditioning actually is an alternative. There is a way to do that, by the way.
BILL: Yes, that is true; there is. But I wanted to keep it cost effective so I don’t have to empty my wallet to do it.
TOM: OK.
BILL: But I have a house that gets a lot of exposure to the sun in the back of the house and I was recently looking over at my home improvement warehouse and they had something called Gila window tinting that they claim will reflect 70 percent of exterior heat, 99 percent of UV, and reflect 55 percent of interior heat during the winter.
TOM: Hmm.
BILL: So I was wondering if you guys had heard anything.
TOM: Dem’s is some bold claims, huh Leslie? (Leslie chuckles) It’s the solution to the nation’s energy crisis.
BILL: It would be nice.
TOM: Well, I will say this. A lot of folks that have very fine furniture, very fine carpets – you know, oriental carpets; things like this, of this nature; antique pieces – do believe in window tinting because it does …
LESLIE: Sunlight is terribly damaging to those things.
TOM: Yeah, exactly. And it’s very common, in a home like that, to find window tinting. I have seen it done really well and I’ve seen it done really badly. And the key is the installation and how carefully that’s done and how you prep the windows to get any speck of anything that’s going to not make them stick or lay nice and tight off is really critical. I don’t think it can hurt. It’s probably not terribly expensive. You might want to try it on a couple of windows and see how you like it before you go for the whole house.
But the other thing is if you ever get around to replacing those windows, just buy low-e glass because low-e glass does the same thing. Low-e glass …
LESLIE: Well, there’s some other options, too.
BILL: Three years before I bought the house and they’re very good windows. But yes, they didn’t replace them with low-e glass, which that would have helped out a lot.
TOM: Yeah, they cheap out. Exactly.
LESLIE: Well Bill, there’s other choices other than tinting and changing your windows as well. They make a lot of fabrics that are completely called blackout fabrics, which means they block the sun from entering in. And it’s available in a lot of different styles and colors and textures and you can have that made into Roman shades, you can have that made into drapes, depending on what your taste is. You can use that to also serve the same purpose.
BILL: That might work out better. My wife wasn’t totally thrilled with the whole tinting of the windows idea. (Leslie and Bill laugh) Domestic harmony would be good.
TOM: Always. (chuckles)
BILL: (laughs) OK, well thank you very much. That helps out a lot. I’ll look into the blackout fabrics and thank you very much. You have a great show.
TOM: You’re welcome, Bill. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT, 888-666-3974.
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