Double glazing and the "sounds of silence"

It may seem somewhat perverse to complain about birds chirping outside my window, but when the window is closed and double glazed, then it was certainly a surprise – an expensive surprise as I had just had spent over $11,000 on five windows to keep out train noise.  Needless to say, if I can hear the birds in the tree just outside my bedroom window, the Ecostar double glazed windows have done little to abate noise from trains.

Ecostar provides a convincing demonstration of the effectiveness of its double glazing. 

It sets up a speaker playing loud music in a sound-proof box, with double glazed glass on a hinged door.  With the door open, one hears how noisy the music is.  With it closed – the sounds of silence.  I was impressed. 

Perhaps even more impressive was the salesman who visited my house to inspect the bedrooms where the double glazed windows were to be installed and provide a quote.  He assured me that other people who lived along railway lines had installed Ecostar windows and were happy with their performance.  To back up his point, the salesman showed me a graph that claimed that the windows can cut noise “by up to 80%.”  The words “up to”, of course, is Ecostar’s escape clause.

After the windows were installed, I gave them the gentlest of tests — would they cut out the chit-chat between the sparrows perched on the tree just outside my window?  They didn’t.  And, as far as cutting out train noise, the windows were a dud.

Is this just a case of “buyer-beware”?  Well, no.  When I phoned Ecostar afterwards, they explained that the windows were not particularly effective in brick veneer houses or ones with a metal roof, not facts that I knew or could reasonably have known.  The company, however, did know this, and as the salesman had inspected my house, he was in a position to advise me that I could not expect significant noise abatement for my house.  He didn’t.

To be fair, the company promptly sent someone out to inspect the windows after I complained, and there were a number of emails and phone calls that followed.  But the message coming out of Ecostar, loud and clear, was that the failure of the windows to perform was the fault of the construction of my house, not its windows. 

Finally, rather than treating my calls as a complaint that needed resolution, the company treated them as “feedback.”  It was only after I told Ecostar that it wasn’t providing them with “feedback” but that I wanted Ecostar to accept responsibility for not warning me about the limitations of their windows that I finally experienced the sounds of silence.  I haven’t heard from Ecostar since.