The weather of course always gets people thinking about getting new windows and doors, especially with such strong cold winds which will leave your old ones rattling off the hinges, and we're having our fair share of this so far this year. But, what continues to be the biggest thing that put replacement windows and doors at the top of our customers priorities lists is energy prices. As energy prices continue to rise more and more people are focusing on the action they can take to reduce the bill costs.

Energy prices was a very hot topic last year too but this year sets to bring a greater public awareness of the advantages of energy efficient home improvements, especially with the Green Deal aiming to gain press around energy efficiency in homes. Safestyle too are continuing to spread the word (and so are our customers!) on the fantastic improvements and savings that can be made with switching to our energy efficient A-Rated Eco Diamond windows.

So, if you want to be one of the thousands of homes we fit every week with energy efficient replacement windows and want to see a drop in those energy bills, then make sure you visit our website for a free quote.

First things first we added a fantastic new window to our range in January with the launch of the A Rated Eco Diamond Window. This has been a tremendous success and has taken the industry by storm. As energy bills have continuously been going up with no signs of slowing we listened to our customers concerns and developed one of the most energy efficient windows the double glazing industry has seen, making a serious reduction in the amount of energy that quite literally flies out of the windows for many. What we have seen this year is one of the biggest shifts in attitude towards energy efficiency with customers becoming a lot savvier about what they can do to reduce waste of energy they are paying for. Naturally this has brought them straight to us allowing us to fit thousands of Eco Diamond windows and in the process shaving hundreds of pounds of customer’s energy bills.

With this energy conscious public we also introduced a fantastic tools to our Safestyle home advisers; the thermal heat detector gun. One of the biggest problems with escaping energy in homes is that you can’t see it. It’s the invisible problem which is only seen at the end of the month when the bill arrives through your letter box. But, not anymore! Now we can show you exactly where your energy is escaping with a clever little tool that uses infrared technology. It can identify how inefficient your old windows are and what options there are to replace them.

 What else have we done this year? Well one big thing we have improved on this year is our social channels. Facebook, twitter, Google+ are all now packed full of tips, advise, product reviews, competitions and importantly discussions about the double glazing industry, energy saving, what’s happening at Safestyle and anything else our customers tell us is important to them.

So let’s also talk adverts. This year has been a great year for new adverts featuring one familiar ad remake and one very different advert the likes of which never seen. It’s no secret that the Window Man touches a strong nerve with much of the UK population. With the number of times he gets stopped in the street and asked why he shouts so much he decided to lay down a challenge for someone to make a better ad than the original pushover. We got some pretty out there entries but ultimately the Window Man decided he could still do a better job and so took on the original to create the new Pushover ad. The remake stays true to the original but as you can imagine would happen with remaking an ad from the 90s has a much fresher and more modern feel. There are also for those eager eyed viewers some new one-liners such as “top banana!”

The Happy Customer TV ad is a new addition which is very different to any advert we have ever made in the past. After sitting down and talking to hundreds of customers we decided to make an advert from their perspective, talking about all the points they loved about Safestyle and their new windows and doors. These adverts have gone down a treat with our customers, who have greatly welcomed some limited breaks from the much louder Window Man ads.

So with all this going on it's no surprise we have beaten all previous years records for business, a trend that looks set for 2013. Quite simply our products are some of the best in the industry, our pricing year on year more affordable with constant strives to improve cost efficiency in our UK factory, and we are listening to and addressing what it is our customers want form their windows and doors!

Our team named "SafeBush" endured that first week or so with very little to keep their top lips warm, and not much to brag about, but with persistence their man-tashes started to fill out, and with careful sculpting the team managed to pull together some moustaches that would put Ron Jeremy to shame.

We had some great efforts, a couple of handlebars, a Dick Van Dyke or two, but the main one we seemed to be seeing was the Super Mario look! It must be making a bit of a comeback.

Of course it's fantastic fun taking part in Movember but the real reason is to promote awareness and raise funds towards Prostate and male Cancers. Our team did a fantastic job and collected over £450 to contribute to the cause!

So how does using more energy than I need impact others?

If you have never heard of climate change and global warming then maybe you've been living under a rock for many years now, but this area, though once open to debate, has converged towards a general consensus between scientists that carbon emissions generated by humans is having a significant effect on our environment.

Carbon emissions are unfortunately a negative consequence for many of the types of ways we generate energy, specifically the burning of fossil fuels. The stage we have reached now is that we're contributing excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. How this relates to efficiency of energy is that if we are not using only the energy we need, we are inevitably contributing to more carbon emissions than is absolutely necessary, and making the problem much worse.

There is a second problem too with excessive use of energy. If we are using more energy than we need we are pushing up the demand for the resource and so putting increased strain on existing energy infrastructure. Extrapolating this out into the future has spelt out big problems for energy shortages in the UK and, whilst we should be looking to drop non-green energy sources in favour of green energy, the shortage pressures are meaning we have to take on energy sources wherever we can. For example, the government have been looking at building new nuclear power stations.

So how can I help?

There are lots of ways you can help, the biggest thing you can do is to start looking at your own home and see where you could improve energy efficiency. This is of course win-win situation as not only will you be helping save the planet you will also be saving some serious cash when your energy bills come in every month!

Here at Safestyle UK we recommend energy efficient windows and doors such as our Eco Diamond range. They're backed by the Energy Saving Trust's big seal of approval and by installing energy efficient double glazing you could save as much as £460+ per year on your bills.

Well perhaps the biggest reason we hear from our customers is the fact that energy prices are going through the roof. With tough times magnifying this affect, naturally our customers start to reassess exactly how they are using energy and start wondering where all their pennies are going. This is a very sensible idea and it should be something households around the UK are keen to get to the bottom of.

So we hear you asking is energy wastage such a big deal? Are we talking a couple of pounds a year wasted leaving the landing light on?

Our answer to that is yes! Energy wastage is a big deal and there is a lot more money going to waste than a few pounds. In fact an average household could be losing hundreds of pounds a year through inefficiencies in the home which is a lot of money. Now who wouldn't want to pull back on some of that extra spend every single year?

One of the biggest problems with energy loss is that it largely goes unseen. We can see lights left on or the TV left on standby, but can we see heat leaving our homes through our windows and doors, or through our roof? These problems are much harder to identify and, as they say, "Out of sight out of mind". For tips on identifying energy waste see our using technology to find energy-savings blog post.

Where is all this energy going?

Energy is lost across a many areas in the home, but there are a few significant losses that can easily be remedied. The first thing to look at is where your energy is used in the home, the biggest proportion being heating accounting for a whopping 60% of all your energy costs. This poses a particular problem for homes in the UK as we have notoriously poorly insulated homes. What happens of course with poor insulation is that the energy we have paid for in heating our homes leaves straight through our windows, doors, roofs and walls. These are not the only energy wastage areas to be concerned about but they are usually the biggest culprits to look to remedy.

Take a look at your windows in your home. You could potentially save over £461 every year by fitting some energy efficient windows such as our Eco Diamond Windows range as recommended by the Energy Saving Trust. Not only are a new set of windows a fantastic addition to your home but they could potentially have paid for themselves in 10 years' time.

If you would like to start smaller (and every little bit helps!) then you could look to upgrade the light bulbs around your home to Energy Saving Light bulbs. It would be a very small investment that should pay itself back within a year!

For more tips on Energy Saving tips and advice visit the Energy Saving Trust website!

Now we've come up with a new set of advertisements which encompass all the things our customers love about Safestyle: our prices, energy savings, product security and quality, our top notch workmanship and not to mention how fantastic our windows and doors look too!

But don’t just take our word for it!

We are lucky enough to have a fantastically diverse and loyal customer base who even if they don't like our older ads, they're thrilled with our products and are happy to pass on a good word or two to friends and family! So enjoy our new ads and let us know what you think! You might be glad to know there's not a Window Man in sight, you know the one…

Saving energy is not always the easiest of tasks, there are so many appliances, uses and potential energy loss areas around your home that it's difficult to keep track of where all that energy is going. Here we have found some innovative tools you can use to make sure energy is not going to waste.

One big problem is of course that we must make assumptions about the energy we may need to use in particular in heating up our homes. Many of us set off to work for the day and set the heating to come on judging what we think the temperatures will be like 8-10 hours later? Unfortunately with the UK's unpredictable weather, you can never be certain of how the day will turn out. It could be freezing cold in the morning and glorious sunshine later in the day. You wouldn't want your heating on full blast if this turns out to be the case, think of all that energy wasted. Wouldn't it be much easier if you could adjust your home heating whilst you're away from home quickly and easily? Well now you can! Check out this clever concept called Passiv Systems which has got a complete set up for smart phone energy management. The idea being that you can control any part of your home heating from anywhere in the world as well as getting useful information such as room temperatures. How cool is that!

Another troublesome area of energy loss that Safestyle are particularly familiar with is heat escaping your home itself such as through the roof, windows and doors. Here is where a Safestyle advisors favourite tool comes in, a thermal energy gun (infrared thermometer). These clever gadgets work by detecting the infrared emission of an object by which it can calculate the total energy being emitted. These gadgets can take readings from a distance and can quite quickly find areas of heat loss. Naturally if there are significant heat losses from your windows and doors this is something Safestyle can assist with by installing energy efficient double glazing. Check out the Safestyle website for more information.

Smart Energy Monitor by British Gas is a great tool to have installed in your home! It works by tracking how much energy you are using and importantly how much this is costing you right down to the minute. It gives homeowners a great chance to really take control of their energy usage and make sensible decisions about their energy use in real time as their using it and not weeks later when the bill arrives in the post.

If you want to start at a smaller scale and keep track of your home appliances why not grab one of these handy little tools. For as little as £10 you can get an energy monitor that allows you to test any appliance by plugging into it to see how much energy it uses. It's cheap and bound to reveal some surprise energy guzzlers! A great Sunday afternoon challenge to find which appliance costs you the most money.

Well we hope you have a good idea of some of the tools that are out there to help keep track of energy usage in your home; we will revisit this area if we hear of any other great tools. Don't forget those little losses here and there start to accumulate quite quickly and all together, every day, every month then can start to put a serious dent in your wallet.

Not only that but because we love hearing from our followers so much it’s a good excuse for us to run some great competitions with some fab prizes! Recently we ran a prize draw for all our followers to enter to win a Kindle Touch and we were overwhelmed by the interest we had. So many people were kind enough to spread the word too and as such we managed to find lots more people to connect with!

Our lucky winner was chosen at random and is now the proud owner of a shiny new Kindle Touch! Congratulations to Laura from Wirrall! Hand posted by the Window Man!

On the basis of such a success we had with this competition, we’re very keen to get do some more so keep your eyes peeled and make sure you find us on our Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

But it’s not all about great competitions, we are working hard to bring you the best industry knowledge and make sure you are getting the best possible information to make an informed decision on not only your choice of windows and doors but also in making sure you are well aware of other areas that are very important to us such as energy efficiency. We are very passionate in making sure you’re not wasting any more on energy bills than you have to whilst at the same time trying to shrink your carbon footprint and impact on the environment!

So for top tips on everything from double glazing to saving the planet, make sure Safestyle UK is your first place to look!

Safestyle has been in business for a long time, but for as long as we can remember the Window Man has been shouting about our promotions and annoying the nation. Who would have known a chap in questionable attire pushing over windows would become the most popular advert we have ever ran?! Yes many hate it, but most just simply love to hate it. Let's not also forget there are a couple of fans out there too, but love it or loathe it, it gets people's attention and has helped us become undoubtedly the most recognised window and door supplier in the UK.

So recently the Window Man came to us with a crazy idea. He decided to put the challenge out there for anyone who ever complained about the ad to see if they can do better. Whilst we had some great entries entered, there was no question that the original is one of a kind.

So what do you do when you have an original masterpiece?

Well if you're a Hollywood director you would remake it and get terrible reviews about how the original is much better. As you can imagine in our case we were pretty confident we couldn't do a worse job than the original so we set out at remaking the 'Pushover' ad and here it is, the Window Man complete with cape and those one-liners! "Yer buy one, yer get one free"!

Well, that was the vegetarians catered for, which will be great news for the Window Man (who is also vegetarian). But the latest news about meat production may have far more of us becoming vegetarians than was planned for… that’s because food experts are suggesting that in 20 years time we may have to be eating insects! So say the food futurologists.

Unsurprisingly the rest of us do appear to be quite so open minded and the vegetarians are most certainly having their own beliefs very much reaffirmed.

The case of insectoid meat is compelling with animal meat prices set to double over the next five years. Insect farming will have far less impact on the environment than current meat rearing methods and some people feel less "squeamish" about the killing of bugs… but that depends on your personal beliefs.

For people in the Western world the idea of a plate full of crickets is more likely to have us reaching for the sick bag but elsewhere people are far more open minded about where they get high protein foods from. In fact in some countries they are regarded as a delicacy.

So how on earth do you get us fussy westerners to chow down on insects? Experts feel that the model is pretty much already in place in our supermarkets. How many thousand tons of fish are consumed each week that does not look like fish? How many sausages do we go through a day? Our favourite burgers have about as much in common with a cow as they do a Frisbee. So, will we make the leap to insect burgers and sausages or would we rather pull our own arms and legs off?

Often the suggestion of what we are eating determines how we will feel about it. Many people will enjoy something familiar, like a burger, if we think it is a "beef" burger. But even if we find that delicious, can we make the leap into eating them regularly. Certainly many food experts will insist that an insect sausage is no less gross than a cheap burger made from "mechanically reclaimed meat".

As open minded as you have to be about these things you can't help feeling that the food producers are going to have as much difficulty getting us to eat insects as the government did in Charlton Heston's seminal sci-fi nightmare, Soylent Green; where the nation's favourite food biscuits turned out to be made from dead people.

Don't go panic buying fish fingers. Usually these stories are a little exaggerated. But the truth is that climate change will affect our diet in some way. And you can affect climate change in a small and positive way by insisting on our Eco Diamond Windows which will reduce your carbon footprint. They’ll also reduce your fuel bill. Request an online quote today.

Droughts, flooding, rising sea levels, mini ice ages, bigger deserts, melting glaciers… many people struggle to get their heads around this sort of stuff because it seems a little too “doomsday” to believe. In many ways it is the old "it'll never happen to me" way of thinking that prevents these scenarios from feeling real. And, whilst we all see the sense in being more environmentally friendly, how many of us understand the true impact of climate change on the human race?

The difficulty with understanding climatology is that the predicted changes are not immediate. These changes occur over decades and centuries (barely two centuries according to latest predictions). So, rather than guessing where the coastline will be in 96 years time or whether we can grow grapes in the Midlands let's take a fictional country and try to understand what might happen.

The country of "Safee" has a population of 67 million people and enjoys a vibrant fishing industry, 2 harvests a year of cereals, vegetables and fruit and a popular and lucrative wine industry. Over the next 75 years the rise in sea levels spills over into the low lands where 40% of your crops are grown. Your sea defences keep failing due to tropical style storm surges and renders the soil poisoned by salt. A series of droughts has withered the vineyards on the mountain slopes so you no longer make any money from your wine exports (all the related jobs have gone too). Flash flooding keeps washing the remaining good quality top soil into the rivers chocking the fresh water fish. More and more countries are ignoring your fishing territories which is becoming increasingly difficult to police with a navy that you can no longer afford.

Your neighbouring country of "Greedy" is doing very well indeed from climate change. They can grow more crops. Their wines are regarded as some of the best in the world and their navy has no problem chasing off the scavengers. People from "Safee" understandably begin to emigrate to "Greedy". It starts with the highly skilled professionals who are very much in demand. This results in a shortage of skilled jobs at home and the lost revenue begins to affect your own education facilities which becomes a downward spiral. Then the less skilled workers begin to leave for the country next door. Ethnic tensions in "Greedy" begin to rise. Both governments begin to fall out because "Greedy" add additional duties to the foods your import. Political tensions between the neighbouring countries escalate as crime amongst illegal immigrants rises. Where does all this go?

This is an extremely and purely fictional example but listening to the words of the UN's Special Representative on Food, Security and Nutrition and you'll be left feeling like you've had a spanking. More incentives for private companies are needed to encourage the right kind of change if we are to maintain stability in the fair distribution of food across the planet. And the reason they are so adamant about this subject probably has something to do with the fact that we haven’t managed to crack this nut properly yet – and this classes as the good time (from a climate change point of view).

So now you have the "big picture" it's important to ensure that you do your bit for the environment at every single opportunity.

Safestyle have Eco Diamond double glazing which is recommended by the Energy Saving Trust so you know you're choosing the top rated windows. On the website you can ask for a free quote as well as finding out more information on Safestyle's corporate environmental policy.

A new report estimates that as many as a third of these front gardens have been tarmac'd over or block paved to provide a parking space.

Is this because we just can't be bothered gardening anymore? Have our tastes changed? Or maybe the difference in car insurance premium is the issue. The question on your insurance form asks if you park your car on the street or on a driveway and the implication is that your car is more likely to get damaged, stolen or broken in to by the public roadside than on your property.

Other reasons proposed point to a desire to get a parking space outside your own house and when you consider just how cluttered your average suburban street has become over the last twenty years it makes sense. You arrive home after a hard day's work with a boot full of shopping only to discover that you'll have to park fifty yards away from you front door. Or worse still, in the next street.

Your local council are not under any obligation to provide parking facilities in residential areas which is why you sometimes see people's curtains twitching with annoyance should you dare to park your outside their house.

An Englishman's home is his castle and we can get very territorial over the issue of parking even if it's in a public area outside your house. And because we have no real right to park outside our own houses the solution is obvious, build a driveway, park outside your front door and prevent anyone from blocking the drive. You also get lower insurance premiums as a bonus.

There is however an unpleasant environmental side effect resulting from seven million fewer front gardens in urban areas and that's the issue of flash flooding. Preventing excess rainwater from soaking into a small front garden effectively turns the area into one giant gutter which dumps millions of tons more water into the draining system. The result is a major flooding problem.

So, will we see a change in legislation that requires additional licensing and fees when attempting to pave over your front garden, or will the government shy away from the topic and put the emphasis on new drainage infrastructure? No one knows but we'll watch this one very, very closely.

If you are turning your front garden into a carpark why not enhance the new look with a spanking new set of double glazed windows from Safestyle.

The biggest worry for lots of people when events of this size happen is the impact it will have on both the local environment as well as the global affects. There are millions of people flying, driving and travelling by train to attend the events and this all accounts for added emissions as well as the construction of venues and waste associated with an event of a size such as the Olympics.

One of the driving forces behind getting the games to London was down to the passion and drive behind London’s bid in providing an energy efficient and green games. This included things like venues having a 25% requirement to be made from recycled materials and the drive on people to cycle and walk to the games wherever possible. The Commission found that the Olympic committee reused or recycled over 98 per cent of waste in the demolition phase of building Olympic facilities, and 99 per cent in construction of the Olympic Park.

The result was not only a fantastic games hosted in London, but also the greenest ever according to  the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012. An excellent example to show for any future event hosts!

Safestyle are also passionate about being leaders in recycling and waste management in our industry. Find out about our recycling policy here.

This move wasn't to save energy, even though switching off your headlights reduces drag from your car's dynamo and therefore saves petrol or diesel (bet you didn't know that!). The researchers were trying to tackle a problem which has plagued us in the UK during this very wet year. The problem is that of headlight glare.

Anyone caught driving through one of our recent torrential downpours will be well aware of the difficulties caused by oncoming headlight glare. You lose sight of the lanes and it prevents to from concentrating and anticipating things ahead. It also makes your eyes heavily fatigued.

This new system effectively has your headlights dodging the raindrops by playing around with the beams and switching them off very briefly so they don't hit the rain drop and refract into oncoming traffic.

It sounds like complete and utter nonsense but this is how sophisticated our technology is becoming.

Even your everyday double glazing technology is getting very smart indeed. Especially if you're clever enough to ask for Safestyle's Eco Diamond windows which are brilliant at disrupting heat rays so that they stay in the room rather than working their way outside. The Energy Saving Trust was so impressed by the performance of our windows that it chose to recommend them. Not bad eh?!

Consider the fact that all of our premium windows are BOGOF (buy one get one free) and you can see that Safestyle is clearly the smarter choice. Ask for a free online double glazing quote here and see for yourself.

Safestyle's amazing technology ensures maximum heat retention and minimum heat loss – saving you more than enough energy to make how many extra cups of tea a year?

The answer was 34,000 cups which could be found on our Safestyle Eco Diamond Windows page and by correctly answering the question Sandeep won the grand prize and £5000 worth of windows and doors to be fitted to his home.

Sandeep, 24, a stock taker for a stocktaking firm, Orridge, was ecstatic when he found out he had won. He said: "I am thrilled and excited to have won this fantastic prize. The win couldn't have come at a better time as I’m in the process of renovating my first home with my partner.  We're having the windows installed next week and I can't wait until it's ready for us to move in. I've experienced the best service from Safestyle and I’m hugely grateful for the win."

More than 200 runner-ups missed out on the grand prize but still managed to pick up an energy thermal gun, enabling them to check for any areas of their home where they are losing energy.

To find out more about Safestyle's super energy efficient windows and how they could save you money on your home energy bills visit the Safestyle website.

The charity challenge was undertaken by our brave factory team, so a big well done to Simon Fairbairn, Nick Bacon, Richard Poulton, Mark Scaife, Nick Stokes, Tony Ward, Keith Jones, Andy Worroll, Darren Wade and their designated drivers  and all round helpers, Gemma Caves and Peter Margieson, on completing the Challenge.

They scaled the highest peaks in Scotland (Ben Nevis), England (Scafell Pike) and Wales (Snowdon), all in  just 24 hours!

In doing so, the team managed to raise almost £5000 for their chosen charities which were Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, NSPCC, RSPCA and Cancer Research UK.

Here’s what some of the exhausted team had to say:

"A real shock to the system… with little sleep, hours of travelling and close to 30 miles of relentless walking I was really pleased to complete the challenge within the 24 hours – the sense of achievement and raising almost £5,000 for our charities made the couple of days of aching worthwhile! Thank you for your support and generous donations. Bring on next year's challenge!" – Nick Bacon

"One of the hardest things I have ever done, had I not started training six weeks prior to it I don’t think I would be able to do it. It was well worth the hard work to help out our four charities." – Simon Fairbairn

"When I came back I wished I lived in a bungalow as my legs were aching so much I could barely climb the stairs!" – Andy Worroll

The whole team would also like to give a big THANK YOU for everyone who gave generously sponsoring the National 3 Peaks Charity Challenge!

At Safestyle Windows we are always looking for new ways to turn double glazing into home entertainment. That's why our TV commercials are so "in your face". (By the way, there's a competition out to create your own Safestyle ad and win a camcorder… have a go here).

But TV ads aside, Disney have created a glass that can project your favourite picture onto the wall. No really, they have and here's the video to prove it.

Pretty amazing stuff isn't it. Perhaps this signals the end of the three porcelain ducks on the wall, or Constable's Hay Wain, or that tennis lady scratching her bum.

The glass works by combining hundreds of tiny curved bits of glass that bend the light like a lens and focus the image on the far wall. It's a great idea but unfortunately it currently takes three days to make just one which means it will be very expensive.

So don't hold your breath, image projecting glass won't be here anytime soon but we always like to let you know what's occurring in the wacky and weird world of the scientists that work on the glass of the future.

As far as futuristic glass goes you can't get any more up to date than our Eco Diamond energy efficient windows which trap in the heat so well that they've been recommended by the Energy Saving Trust. Ask for a free online quote today.

Your vocal chords vibrate when you pass air over them and that's how we make speech noise. Those vibrations pass through the air and make our eardrums vibrate which in turn becomes signal that our brains can understand and, hey presto we have language and a conversation.

But those vibrations also permeate all of the air in a room and, strange as it may seem, they make everything else vibrate ever so slightly. That also includes the windows. It's not that your windows are loose in any way, especially if you've got Safestyle's Eco Diamond Windows which are absolutely rock solid.

For the conspiracy theorists who are convinced that we are being listened to at every moment of every day, you're never far from a listening device whether it be a hidden "wire", a bug under your coffee table or an unscrupulous journalist hacking your mobile phone. The idea of someone sat hidden from view and firing a laser at your lounge window still sounds like it belongs in a Hollywood movie but actually it is probably happening somewhere, to someone, right now.

The reality is, this technology doesn't even class as space age, here's a website that shows you how to build your own laser listening device (don't take that as an invitation to go firing lasers at people's houses… that'd just be rude!… and probably illegal).

Naturally, for the subversives amongst you, Safestyle will offer an "anti-spy" window as soon as we hear there's one available. In the meantime you can stop peeping toms from seeing your bits and pieces with our creative range of obscure glass (you probably better know it as privacy glass or "frosted" glass).

Obscure glass is available with all of our Eco Diamond double glazing so keep the beady eyes at bay and ask for a free online quote today.

When it comes to our double glazing we all like the peace of mind that comes with security locks and toughened safety glass. Just watch an old spooky film and the windows are forever smashing as soon as the wind gets up.

At Safestyle we've always got safety in mind, that's why we're called "Safe-Style". Essentially it's all about keeping the outside where it belongs… outside. Windows have always been good at keeping out the rain. Stronger windows and weather-proof seals also meant we could keep out the wind. Then came the problem of the cold which was addressed by double glazing. Then we replaced the air between the double glazing panes with Argon gas, which keeps the cold out even better. Then our Pilkington K Glass™ incorporated a special layer that bounces the heat back inside to prevent it escaping outside.

But spare a thought for our Canadian cousins. A typical cabin in the woods is not only double glazed (wow it gets nippy out that way in winter!), but Canadian cabin windows have to keep another intruder out… bears!

A typical pane of glass in a log cabin residence is around 18cm thick otherwise a determined bear can (and probably will) claw its way through to get at your yummy smelling din dins.

Luckily for us in the UK we haven't had the problem of bears for a few hundred years now although, at Safestyle UK, we are eager to help. So, if you've any special requests (no matter how unusual), fill in the form for a FREE quote and we’ll call you right back.

Get a FREE quote today for Safestyle Eco Diamond windows.

The lady in white, seen through a window is a common paranormal sighting around the world. Often appearing as a grainy or smudged image in a photograph these spooky apparitions make the hairs on our necks tingle. But are they real or are they faked? Opinion is often fiercely divided so we thought we'd investigate the science behind the "ghost in the glass."

The first explanation seems relatively obvious: someone has tampered with the photo. There are a few ways this can be done. Before digital photography it was possible to "double expose" a photograph in the dark room. By masking off a portion of the photo (perhaps a large corner of the window) you expose your photograph normally and then "add in" a second photo (of a person) afterwards. By under exposing the second image you could create a ghostly (slightly see-through) image of the person in the window. Hey presto, a ghost!

Now that we can take digital photos we really can make the camera lie. "Photoshopping" is a term we often associate with airbrushing pictures of models on magazine covers so they look near perfect. However, you can do a lot more with the Adobe Photoshop software used by designers (available for both Apple Mac and Windows). A skilled graphic designer can easily fake a ghostly figure in a dark and spooky window. If you're into your graphic design here's an article that shows you how to make your own ghost.

There is another explanation for a mysterious entity appearing in a window that involves a clever technique created long before photography was invented. It is called Pepper's Ghost. Thanks to the work of pioneering 16th Century Italian scientist, Giambattista della Porta, a Victorian inventor, John Pepper, created a special effect for theatre productions that made it possible for ghosts to appear on stage during a play, magic or psychic performance. The system involves a hidden room, just off stage, and a carefully angled sheet of glass in which the ghost materialises and then fades away.

Of course, there is a third possible explanation for the ghost in the window… there really was a ghost!

Safestyle Eco Diamond windows may be absolutely magical but the only ethereal stuff they contain is Argon gas… rather than ectoplasm! And while they will reflect heat back into your home to prevent heat loss and help reduce your heating bills, we wouldn't worry too much about ghosts! So for energy saving windows and doors, who you gonna call?