Home Shows Are a Bad Place to Get Good Information

I spent many hours at the Minneapolis Home and Garden Show today and I came out of it with one conclusion- the people that sell replacement windows in the Twin Cities area don't really know much about windows. I asked a ton of questions and I got a ton of wrong answers.

Before I go into this too far let me qualify this attitude of mine. When I visited the Andersen, Preservation, Marvin, and Pella booths there were professionals there and they had good solid answers to every question. I was impressed by their professionalism across the board. Then I went to Western Remodelers.

I decided to tour the show systematically and Western Remodelers was along the first wall I started at. They set the tone for my overall disgust for the multiple sets of crap I had to listen to.

The sales manager for the company engaged me and we made some small talk. Then I asked a couple of questions about energy efficiency and he handed me a white paper from 1994. He cited their contention that anything beyond .30 for a u-factor was a waste of money and that everything I told him from the U.S. Department of Energy was basically crap. He knew more about windows than they would ever know! When I asked him if he was saying that the DOE was wrong he told me I wasn't their type of customer and I should leave! Wow, what a great start. I get some jerk who is stuck in 1994. As far as replacement windows go, anybody who had researched the products wasn't a viable customer....and please, hold the questions.

I went to a few others in the same row and, surprisingly, they sold the same brands but said different things. At Budget Exteriors I was shown a window "that qualifies for the energy rebate in the stimulus package." When I looked at it the u-factor on the label was .32, too high for the energy tax credit. When I pointed that out to him he said " is that right, I'll have to look into that." Wow, people come here for advice!

It was about half way through the show I realized that every booth except the manufacturer booths had doled out some form of misinformation. How does the general public come to any kind of a conclusion at a show like this? I wondered if I was expecting too much or if they just hire street people for this kind of home show? Are replacement windows that complicated?

I guess the bottom line is that I should trust that the general public will figure out what's true and what isn't. When it comes to replacement windows the only people I would trust are the manufacturers and websites like NFRC and the Effient Window Collaborative have. It seems that Billy Bob and Jerry Snyder surely don't know what they are talking about.