Encinitas Glass — Insured & Bonded

Window in Encinitas, CA

Most of what gets typed into a phone as Encinitas glass is one failed pane, not a window project: a rock through a slider lite, a sealed unit gone milky, a sidelight cracked by a swinging screen door.

The city is five older towns stitched together in 1986 — Old Encinitas, New Encinitas, Leucadia, Cardiff-by-the-Sea and Olivenhain — and the honest answer to a single broken lite is different in each of them, because the sash holding that glass was built in a different decade.

The cottages west of the tracks in Old Encinitas and Cardiff-by-the-Sea are the oldest stock in the city. Wood sash, true single-pane annealed glass, divided lites, and glazing putty painted over so many times it has gone to chalk.

On those, glass really is a repair: the lite comes out, the rabbet gets cleaned back to bare wood, new points and a fresh bead of compound go in, and the sash works again. What finishes those windows is not the glass but water standing in the bottom rail joint until the joint opens.

If that rail is soft enough to take a screwdriver, reglazing it is money spent twice.

Cross the low coastal ridge between Old Encinitas and New Encinitas and the stock jumps forward fifty years. Village Park and the tracts off Encinitas Boulevard and Santa Fe Drive went up in the 1970s and early 1980s behind mill-finish and bronze-anodized aluminum sliders, single glazed, a surprising number still original.

Glass there is a cut-to-size lite set in new glazing vinyl, one of the few jobs where the cheap answer is also the correct one.

The exception is a sash racked out of square, or a frame whose steel install screws have corroded and swollen until they split the aluminum — a new lite there cracks in the same corner inside a season.

The call that comes most often from New Encinitas and the Encinitas Ranch tracts off Quail Gardens Drive is haze between the panes. That ground was the Paul Ecke flower ranch before the specific plan went through in the mid-1990s, so much of the glazing out there is past thirty years, where a first-generation dual-seal unit gives up.

When the secondary seal goes, the desiccant saturates and leaves a mineral film that will not wipe off from either side. That is glass replacement, not window replacement: a new sealed unit with a warm-edge spacer goes back into the existing sash.

We argue against it only on a discontinued proprietary sash with no removable glazing bead, where the carrier comes out with the glass.

What sets this city apart from Oceanside is the bluff. Encinitas climbs from the waterline to just over four hundred feet, with Batiquitos Lagoon at the north end and San Elijo Lagoon at the south, and its western edge is a terrace dropping straight to the sand at Beacon's, Stone Steps and Swami's.

Oceanside's beachfront is low, wide and broken by a harbor. A bluff-top house in Leucadia takes the onshore flow, and everything dissolved in it, with nothing but open water in front.

Out there the glass is the symptom: sealed units fail early because the gaskets and the frame drainage go first, and by then the plated rollers, cam latches and fasteners are blooming white.

We will still set a new unit in an ocean-facing slider, and still say plainly that you bought a year, because the hardware is on the same clock.

Two glass specifications earn their price here, and both drop into sash you already have. The first is laminated. The rail corridor runs the length of the city, through Cardiff, past the downtown station and north through Leucadia, and horn noise travels a long way on a still night.

A laminated lite with a PVB or ionoplast interlayer in the bedroom facing the tracks or Coast Highway 101 does more for sleep than a new window with a thicker air gap. The second is safety glazing.

Older cottages, garden doors and narrow sidelights here often carry plain annealed glass where a replacement lite is not permitted to be plain — beside a door, along a walkway, around a tub — so those come back tempered or laminated.

Encinitas has been its own city since 1986, so the permit comes from the city's Development Services counter at the civic center on South Vulcan Avenue, not from the county.

That trips people up in Olivenhain, homesteaded by German settlers and still running to horse properties and acre-plus parcels: it reads like county backcountry but sits inside city limits, so the city issues the permits.

Most of the city sits in the coastal zone, and Encinitas has issued its own coastal development permits since the Coastal Commission certified its Local Coastal Program in 1995. Repair and maintenance that does not add to or enlarge the building is exempt from that coastal permit, so a like-for-like reglaze is normally a building division matter only.

Enlarging the opening is where the coastal side wakes up, and a full change-out also gets checked against the fenestration numbers on the NFRC label where glass returned to an existing frame does not. Confirm yours at the counter before you order glass.

Inland, the specification ought to change and often does not. Around Olivenhain and the east end of New Encinitas the salt load falls away fast and the enemies become west-facing afternoon sun and dust off the ridge.

Low-E coatings and a lower solar heat gain number matter there; marine hardware does not, and nobody off Rancho Santa Fe Road should pay for it. So the short version for most people searching Encinitas glass: one fogged unit or one broken lite, buy one piece of glass.

Four or five failed units down the same elevation of a bluff-top house, with latches that no longer pull the sash tight, and the glass is telling you the windows are done. New glass in those frames is the most expensive way to find that out.