Has anyone installed secondary double glazing?

[MrsJoeHart]

Would you tell me about it?

I have a Victorian house with sash windows, they have a some point been double glazed with a very thin gap it looks like the windows are original. Our road is quite busy and the double glazing doesn't offer much sound insulation and we get a notiable draft coming through. I don't want to put in upvc windows and don't have the money to have new double glazed wooden sash windows installed so was wondering about secondary double glazing.

Is it cheaper than double glazing, can you do it yourself? What are the drawbacks?

There's quite a bit about it in this book. There are various materials and prices vary according to whether you go for glass or plastic, and what sort you have depends on whether you want to open the windows some of the time.
My parents had it done recently and are very pleased.

You can read about in my thread here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/property/a1676084-Is-secondary-glazing-better-than-double-or-triple-glazinf-for-noise-insulation

If you read to end of thread you will see it didn't work for me and looked really, really awful too.

No idea about costs but when we lived on a noisy road what we did was have double glazing fitted where the two panes of glass were different thickness (4mm and 6mm I think??). The idea is that the panes vibrate at different frequencies?? It worked for us - we had it in uPVC a crime I know I'm physicist - but I remember reading about it on the pilkington website (rather than just the double glazing sales spiel). We just did it in the main living room.

We have secondary glazing on our original victorian sash windows. Ours is by Everest, and is silver aluminium, estimated about 15-20 years old (it was there when we purchased the house). It works, really really well, in terms of drafts and heat retention. It seems to work for noise too (but we are in the middle of nowhere so rarely get any cars down the lane anyway!). I have to be honest, it's fugly. You can see the aluminium silver frames quite clearly when you look for them. BUT, we bought the house with it, so have never seen the windows in their full glory, so we're actually very happy with it. We got a quote for replacing like for like (with white frames rather than silver) and the quote was something crazy like £2000 for two sash windows, and the company said we'd be mad to do it. Things have moved on, and I understand that new secondary glazing would be slightly less intrusive but not enough to justify £2000 for the downstairs of the house. As we decorate each room, we are painting the non-movable parts of the frames white, which helps a bit.

Not a single person has ever come into our house and noticed that we have secondary glazing, until we point it out to them. With curtains, it is barely noticable. We're lucky that we have lovely rural views from each window so maybe the view distracts people from the windows? You wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it.

So we're happy with it, and keeping it, but I do feel that if you are currently used to having your sash windows 'bare' and enjoying the three dimensional beauty of the woodwork/architraves then I can see it could become one of those things that bug you, and you couldn't get used to (it's basically like looking at a sash window behind a TV screen!) as you would constantly be noticing it iyswim.