Hello, my name is Iggy and I live in Perth, Australia. Last month, I was out in my garden enjoying the sunshine when I noticed that there was something strange on my roof. I climbed up onto the roof of my home and discovered some damage. While I was up on the roof, I took a long look down at my garden. Seeing it from such a strange angle made me realise how overgrown it looked. The next day I called in some contractors to fix the problems. While they worked, they taught me plenty of cool tips and tricks.
The most common types of glass used in shower screens are either toughened or laminated for safety purposes. While both these glass options do much the same job in a shower, giving you some protection if the glass breaks, they aren't both suitable for frameless shower screens. To get things right here, you need to choose the right glass for your chosen screen that also conforms to shower safety standards. What do you need to know about frameless shower screen glass?
Safety Glass and Vertical Strength
Frameless shower screens don't have frames to hold their glass in place. This typically means that the glass you use in this kind of screen needs to be strong enough to hang without support on more than one side. The glass's vertical strength usually dictates this ability to hang without a frame.
While both toughened and laminated shower screen glasses are more or less equally strong from a breakage perspective, their vertical strength levels are different. Toughened glass is strong enough to cope without support from a frame; laminated glass isn't because it has a lower vertical strength. For this reason, shower screen installers usually recommend that you use toughened rather than laminated glass in a frameless screen.
Safety Glass Standards
Using safety glass in shower screens is an easy way to avoid having accidents if the glass in your screen were to break for some reason. For example, if the toughened glass in a frameless shower screen broke, then it should break into lots of very small blunt pieces that are less likely to cut than the shards or big pieces you'd see with regular broken glass.
To get this level of protection, however, you need to ensure that the toughened glass you use in your frameless screen conforms to Australian testing and installation standards. For example, you should look for Grade A shower screen toughened glass that is marked as meeting AS 1288 and 2208 standards.
These standards may also affect the thickness of the toughened glass you should use in your shower screen. The minimum recommended thickness is 6mm; however, you may need thicker glass for larger or custom shaped screens in some cases. To find out more about meeting glass thickness and general safety standards for your new shower screen, talk to your shower screen installer who will be able to advise you on the best and safest options for your needs.
Share31 July 2018
