Spontaneous Glass Breakage Shower Door

The number one reason glass doors break is because of some form of damage to the glass around the edges of that door meshulam said.

Spontaneous glass breakage shower door. The number two reason would be through inclusions microscopic imperfections that grow into a larger crack internally to the pressure layers. Any of these can result in creating a concentrated point load on the edge or corner of the glass. A far less common but often cited cause of spontaneous glass breakage is nickel sulfide nis inclusions in tempered glass. Those pressure layers eventually cause the glass to just shatter.

Baltimore on a cold day in february evelyn businsky was on her couch when the sliding glass door behind her spontaneously shattered. Treat the shower doors and enclosure gently. They are typically benign even when occurring in tempered glass. The explosion was spontaneous.

Despite that material s high levels of strength and capacity to meet safety glazing requirements it is uniquely vulnerable to these types of failures. If there are more than one bumper that the shower door hits adjust the door so they are impacted. Don t let kids hang on towel bars. I was glad that the curtain was closed because it just burst.

The incidents of spontaneous glass breakage in chicago las vegas austin texas and toronto occurred exclusively with tempered glass. Don t slam the door. Small nickel sulfide stones can form randomly in the production of float glass. One minute the shower door was completely intact.

Ironically the center tension zone engineered into tempered glass through the quenching process is also what makes it so vulnerable to catastrophic breakage. This is problematic since there are no warning signs and an apparently intact shower door may simply break into pieces suddenly. There can be several causes or reasons for spontaneous breakages in tempered glass like impact load poor glazing glass to glass contact glass to metal contact very hard setting blocks etc. The breakage was never a crack that progressed into pieces of glass tinkling to the floor.

Homeowners who have experienced this have described the sound as deafening.