Glass Shower Doors Breaking
A glass shower door can break even if no one s in the bathroom.
Glass shower doors breaking. This makes the glass much stronger against direct impact but weakens it against side impact. The source of the problem the material. 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. Don t let kids hang on towel bars.
Treat the shower doors and enclosure gently. Replace any deformed or broken grommets or plastic washers. Most glass shower doors are put through a process called tempering where its tensile strength is altered during a heating process. That s an annual average of about 300 a year.
A hanging glass shower door that falls from its track for example may shatter quite easily. If there are more than one bumper that the shower door hits adjust the door so they are impacted. However some showers have glass bumping up against tile or baseboards. Tempered glass can break for many reasons starting with edge damage which happens with normal wear and tear.
Those pressure layers eventually cause the glass to just shatter. Glass shouldn t touch anything besides a specially designed bumper. This is how tempered safety glass breaks it. Edges are the most sensitive areas especially with frameless shower doors.
It s called a spontaneous blow and it can happen because the glass is tempered. Meaning if you were to drop the glass on its side it would instantly shatter. The number two reason would be through inclusions microscopic imperfections that grow into a larger crack internally to the pressure layers. During the heating process the glass becomes more resistant to a direct impact but much more susceptible to a side impact.
Don t slam the door. It is conceivable that some of the exploding shower doors occur because one of the top rollers loosens causing the door to fall an inch or two shattering on impact.