Broken glass and insurance claims on double glazing.
The rule is simpler than the policy wording makes it look. A sudden event that breaks glass is covered and usually excess-free. Gradual failure of the edge seal never is. Everything else - who pays for the whole unit, whether you can upgrade from single glazing on the insurer's dollar, what to photograph - follows from that one distinction.
Sudden event: claim. Gradual failure: not a claim.
Every standard Victorian home building policy covers accidental glass breakage, and most waive the excess on a glass-only claim because it is cheaper for the insurer than processing an argument. A branch through the living room slider in an October southerly, a cricket ball from next door, a jemmied lock on a break-in - all claims. Straightforward ones.
What is excluded, in wording that varies but never in substance, is gradual deterioration. Wear and tear. Faulty workmanship or materials. Inherent defect. A double-glazed unit whose edge seal has slowly given up and gone cloudy sits squarely inside that exclusion, because the failure took fifteen years and nothing sudden happened to it. This trips people up weekly, and the reason is understandable: from the couch, a fogged window and a cracked window both read as "the window is broken". To an insurer they are opposite categories.
Where a fogged unit actually goes.
Straight to the manufacturer's IGU warranty, which is 10 years on any compliant AS 4666 unit and covers precisely this failure. Before you make a single phone call, find the install date. Inside 10 years and you pay nothing. Outside it and you are looking at $580-$980 for a like-for-like reglaze into your existing frame - the frame, hardware and paint all stay, the job takes about ninety minutes. We have walked through that whole process on our fogged IGU replacement page, including how to tell seal failure apart from ordinary room-side condensation, which is a completely different problem with a completely different fix.
Why the insurer owes you the whole unit, not one pane.
This is the single most useful thing on this page. An insulating glass unit is not two windows. It is one sealed cartridge - two panes, an aluminium or warm-edge spacer bar, a desiccant charge in the spacer, an argon fill and a two-stage edge seal - manufactured as a single item under AS 4666. Break either pane and the whole cartridge is destroyed. There is no repair path, no half-measure, no replacing "the outside sheet".
Most assessors know this. Occasionally one scopes a claim as a sheet of float glass because that is what the estimating software offered them. If that happens, ask politely for AS 4666 to be applied to the scope and for the glazier's specification to be requested. We write the standard reference into our quotes as a matter of course, which usually ends the conversation before it starts.
Storm claim, and the upgrade question everyone asks.
Real shape of a job we see several times each storm season. A gum limb comes through a 2,100mm x 1,200mm single-glazed aluminium living room window on the west elevation of a 1994 Hampton Park brick veneer during a spring squall. The homeowner boards it that night, photographs everything, and lodges the claim on the Monday.
The insurer's obligation is like-for-like: they owe a single-glazed aluminium window in that opening, and the settlement lands around $900-$1,400 including the make-safe. But the owner has been meaning to double glaze that wall for six years, because it is the hot wall, the loud wall and the wall the westerly hits. So they take the settlement figure as a cash contribution and put it toward a thermally-broken double-glazed replacement, which from our pricing guide runs $2,400-$3,800 for a large opening. Out of pocket: roughly $1,200-$2,600 for a window that is dramatically better than the one the tree destroyed. That is betterment, it is completely legitimate, and it is how a bad night turns into the first stage of a sensible plan.
Two rules make it work. Get the scope and the settlement figure in writing before anyone talks about upgrades - an insurer settling a single-glazing loss does not want to be quoted a double-glazing price, and muddling the two conversations is how claims stall for six weeks. And never let a repairer imply to the insurer that the double glazing was there before. It was not. You are voluntarily topping up. Say that plainly and nobody has a problem.
One thing worth checking on the policy.
Some policies cap glass replacement per event or per year, and a few older products exclude "glass in doors" or apply a separate excess to it. If you have large glazed doors - the sort on our double-glazed doors page - it is worth a two-minute read of the product disclosure statement before you need it rather than after. Note too that new glass in a door, a sidelight, a window with a sill under 500mm or any wet area must be Grade A safety glass under AS 1288. If your 1980s original was ordinary annealed float, which plenty were, the replacement cannot be. That is not the insurer being difficult. That is the law, and any reinstatement has to meet the current standard.
Before anyone touches the glass.
- Wide shot of the whole window in the wall, so orientation and location are obvious.
- Close-up of the damage, and the cause if it is still lying there - branch, ball, tool marks on the lock.
- The compliance label on the frame if one survives. It carries the AS 2047 rating and the manufacturer.
- The make-safe boarding after you fit it. Reasonable make-safe is claimable; letting weather in for a week is not.
- Use the phone camera, not screenshots. The embedded timestamp is the thing that matters.
Storm season here runs from roughly September through February, and the west and north-west elevations across the City of Casey take the worst of it. If you are in a suburb with mature gums close to the house - a lot of Berwick, Harkaway and Upper Beaconsfield - the odds catch up with you eventually. Glazing spec will not stop a limb, but laminated outer panes hold together when they break rather than landing in the lounge room, which is one of the quiet arguments for the laminated builds on our acoustic glazing page.
Insurance questions on double glazing.
Does home insurance cover a broken double-glazed window?
Accidental breakage of glass is covered by almost every standard Victorian home building policy, and most do not apply an excess to a glass-only claim. What is covered is the sudden event - a cricket ball, a storm-thrown branch, a break-in. What is never covered is gradual deterioration, which is the exact category a fogged edge seal falls into. So a smashed pane is a claim and a cloudy pane is a warranty matter or a bill. The distinction catches people out constantly because both look like a broken window from the couch.
Will my insurer pay to replace the whole double-glazed unit or just one pane?
The whole insulating glass unit, and this is worth knowing before you argue with an assessor. You cannot replace one pane of an IGU. The two panes, the spacer bar, the desiccant and the argon are a single sealed cartridge manufactured as one item, and breaking either pane destroys the unit. A competent assessor knows this. If yours proposes to pay for one sheet of float glass, ask for the AS 4666 manufacturing standard to be applied to the scope. We put that in writing on our quotes for exactly this reason.
Is a fogged or cloudy double-glazed window an insurance claim?
No. Seal failure is gradual deterioration and every policy we have read excludes it, usually under wear and tear or faulty workmanship. Your path is the manufacturer's IGU warranty, which is 10 years on a compliant unit and covers exactly this failure mode. Check the install date before you do anything else. If the unit is inside warranty it costs you nothing, and if it is at year 14 you are paying $580-$980 for a like-for-like reglaze into the existing frame.
Does upgrading to double glazing after storm damage cost me my claim?
It does not, provided you handle it as a betterment top-up rather than an argument. Your insurer owes you like-for-like reinstatement, so if a storm took out a single-glazed window they will pay for a single-glazed window. You can direct that settlement figure toward a double-glazed unit and pay the difference yourself. On a medium opening that is typically a $700-$1,200 gap. Get the scope and the settlement figure in writing first, then talk to us about the upgrade, and never let the two conversations run at the same time.
What do I need to photograph before anyone touches the glass?
Photograph the whole window in the wall so the assessor can see location and orientation, then the damage close up, then the compliance label on the frame if you can find one, then whatever caused it - the branch, the ball, the forced lock. Timestamp matters, so use your phone camera rather than a screenshot. If the window is a security risk, board it and photograph the boarding too, because reasonable make-safe costs are claimable and unreasonable delay that lets weather in is not.
Where we attend insurance work.
Need a quote your assessor will accept?
Itemised, AS 4666 and AS 2047 referenced, with the betterment gap shown separately so nothing gets muddled. Free measure across South East Melbourne.