Window replacement in Cedar Hills, Utah

A city that got its glass all at once

Cedar Hills is unusual, and it makes the city easy to read. The great majority of it was built between the early 1990s and about 2008. There is very little older stock and, because the city is close to built out, very little newer stock either. Almost every house here got its glass inside the same fifteen-year span, from the same generation of builder-grade vinyl.

Insulated glass units from that era were a real improvement over what came before, and they were also built to a price. The sealant that holds the argon in has a service life measured in decades, not centuries. Cedar Hills is now at the far end of that life, which is why fogged units tend to appear on one house, then the neighbor's, then three more down the street inside a couple of years. Nothing is wrong with the neighborhood. Everything was simply installed at once.

One practical upside: homes here tend to share a small set of window sizes and configurations, so a whole-house count goes quickly. We count the openings with you and put the number on paper the same day.

We work the whole city: the streets around Cedar Hills Golf Club, the neighborhoods along Canyon Road, the bench above Manila, and the homes backing onto the Murdock Canal Trail.

High on the bench, facing west with nothing in the way

Cedar Hills sits high on the bench between the mouth of American Fork Canyon and Grove Creek Canyon, which puts it in the path of downslope wind off both.

It also faces west across an open valley with nothing in between. West-facing glass in Cedar Hills takes direct low-angle sun for the last several hours of every summer day, which is the hardest condition there is for a window. Low-angle light comes in under eaves that would shade a midday sun completely, so overhangs do not help. The fix is in the glass package: a low-E coating tuned for solar heat gain, not only for insulation.

The same exposure explains why upstairs rooms on the west side run hot into the evening long after the air conditioning has caught up downstairs, and why blinds on that side fade years before the ones on the north.

Because the failures arrive together here, the question we get most in Cedar Hills is whether to do the whole house at once or a few openings at a time. There is no single right answer. Doing it all at once usually earns a better per-window price and gives you one warranty start date. Phasing spreads the cost and lets you start with the west side, which is where the heat and the fading are. The thing worth knowing is that rebate terms are published on annual cycles and can change, so we quote the program that is current when you buy rather than one we expect to exist later. We will put both versions on paper and let you pick.

Cedar Hills is about fifteen minutes from us.