When you live in an area that has encounters with hurricanes and other types of weather, it’s important to have impact resistance windows and doors. Even sliding glass doors would need to be reinforced with precision roller bearings and the like to protect everything more efficiently. The reason being is that if a hurricane hits and the glass in your doors and windows are not strong enough, the glass will break and high speed winds will entire the building, trying to blow up the building like a balloon. This will cause the roof to blow off, walls to fail and fall, not to mention the water damage from the rains and floods.

If you don’t have reinforced glass, you will need batting down hatches or shutters to close over the windows and doors before the storm hits and that is not always done in time.

Other types of windows are:

1. Regular glass, which is the most common and is not heat treated or strengthened at all.




2. Tempered glass is also known as safety glass and is about four times stronger than regular glass. This is the standard issue for sliding doors or a french door.
3. Wind guard glass, or impact resistance glass feels as strong as a brick wall to the touch. It is also a very effective noise reducer. The frame is made first which is made from a very sturdy material. Special silicon is then used to set the glass into the frame and adhere it. The glass itself is laminated after being heat treated for added protection. For a sliding door, precision roller bearings are added to the tracks at this point.

There is actually a test done at the factory to test each piece of glass. The way it’s done is by setting up a machine a few feet from each pane. The machine launches a piece of two by four wood at each window pane at 50 ft per second which translates out to about 34 miles per house. This simulates what would happen during a hurricane. The results were quite telling and are as follows:

1. The regular glass shattered into pieces all over the place leaving not a whole lot left in the pane.
2. The tempered glass had no shattering but still broke a whole through the glass.
3. However, while the wind guard glass did crack, there was no major breakage and no place for wind and water to get through. Also, remember that the window is laminated so the breakage occurring to the glass between the pieces of laminate so the building stayed sealed.
   
   As mentioned before, in a impact resistance door or frame, the precision roller bearings have to be reinforced. Double bearings are available for doors like these were high speeds, high winds and a high level of performance is needed.