Two types of safety glass are heat strengthened and tempered.
Safety tempered glass door.
Tempered glass in turn is cooled at a faster rate than heat strengthened glass.
In the event that your shower door breaks tempered glass will cause the glass to break into dull cubes while regular glass will break into jagged shards.
The glass which must be pre cut and edged before being put into the tempering furnace is heated to approximately 1200 f and then cooled rapidly.
For this reason tempered glass is most often used where standard glass could pose a danger.
Because of the way tempered glass is heat treated it breaks into small safe pieces rather than large shards.
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What is tempered glass.
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Glass doors there is a mandatory federal safety standard for glass in shower and bathtub enclosures doors storm doors and glass sliding doors.
In addition any glass located adjacent to a door within a 24 inch arc of the door must be constructed from safety glass if the bottom edge of the glass is less than 60 inches above the walking.
Heat strengthened glass is cooled at a rate faster than regular annealed glass.
An installer typically adds a small label indicating that the glass now meets the cpsc standard for safety glass after completing the work.
Scotchshield manufactured by 3m is one of several brands of safety film that can be applied to old doors and windows to provide shatter protection.
Both laminated and tempered glass are considered safety glass because they meet the requirements set forth by various code organizations that enable them to be used in the situations above.
This process is also known as quenching.
Cpsc updated the mandatory standard in 2016.
There are also four exception allowed as noted below in the citation from the residential edition of the florida building code fbc and the international residential code irc is similar.
Showering behind safety glass.
Another way to strengthen glass is to use more than one lite of glass in the application.
Tempered glass should rupture into small fragmented pieces and not into larger shards if shattered.
There are safety standards in place for some consumer products that use tempered glass.
These criteria are why safety glass is always used for shower doors car windshields and many other glass products.
What is laminated glass.
This is called dicing and makes tempered glass safer than standard annealed glass.
The strong choice fully tempered glass is four to five times stronger than annealed glass and breaks into dull edged particles that are less likely to cause serious injury such that tempered glass can satisfy safety glazing requirements.