Did any of you see Grand Designs on Wednesday this week? If you were, you might have noticed the princely sum paid by the home owners for some triple glazed units. That’s right, £60,000. This £60k bought them less than half a dozen triple glazed units. Yes they were quite big, in fact for a residential project they were massive. But not £60,000 massive.

Like most of the projects on Grand Designs, the glass is sourced outside of the UK. Something which has always frustrated me. And this one was no different, which may explain part of the massive cost for those triple glazed units. I think most of the industry that was watching the program had their jaws dropped on the floor. Firstly because of the price, secondly because that people are still getting their glass from Europe.

I don’t understand why people who undertake these projects still get their glass from the continent despite the rather advanced glass technologies in the UK. Things have moved along quite quickly and I think everyone reading this would know of a glass supplier that could build and deliver large triple glazed units.

Think about it, “large triple glazed units”. Maybe five or six years that would have been a term most glass people might have had a sharp intake of breath over. But now, with so many specialist companies popping up all over the place, items like this can now easily be made on these shores as far as I’m concerned. And at much less than £60k!

What this program has done I think is focus a few minds back on the British glass industry. I know I wrote a post a week or two ago about Britain being years and years behind other countries. But I will say we’re not that far behind where we can specify large glass units of the double or triple glazed variety. We still have a lot of innovation to be proud of, the man power, the brains and engineering. I think we are fully justified as an industry to go out there to the architects and dream-home builders and say “choose us!”