Tinting on Demand with SageGlass

Sizing and placing of windows has always required balancing the need to provide daylight and views with the need to manage solar heat gain and limit heat loss. “Fundamentally, a static window with fixed properties is almost always a poor compromise between night and day, summer and winter, sunny and overcast,” says Stephen Selkowitz, who heads the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). A key solution, according to Selkowitz, is dynamic control of glazing, something his group has been investigating for twenty years. Finally, a viable dynamic glazing for skylights, windows, and fixed glazing has arrived: SageGlass® from Sage Electrochromics, Inc.

With SageGlass, the transmittance properties of the glazing can be switched from clear to a dark Prussian blue tint with the push of a button. SageGlass isn’t the first dynamic glazing to enter the market. Taliq Corporation, for example, developed an interior electrochromic glazing system that could be switched from clear to opaque (primarily for privacy in interior conference rooms), but the cost was high and the market limited, eventually putting the company out of business. A number of other manufacturers developed dynamic electrochromic glazings for exterior fenestration, but these efforts, like Taliq’s, relied on organic electrochromic layers and have failed.