Glass garage doors, chosen for hail and hard winters

A full-view door is a sectional garage door built from an aluminum frame with glass or clear plastic panels set into it, so the whole face of the door reads as windows. It rolls up on the same kind of track as a steel door and runs on the same kind of opener, which is why it can go into most ordinary garages.

Most of the ones we put up go on newer homes with clean, modern lines, where a dark frame and frosted panels look right. The other half go on garages that have turned into something else: a home gym, a workshop, a place to restore a car in winter. There the appeal is daylight without opening the door.

Hail is the first question here, and it deserves a straight answer. Tempered glass is far tougher than ordinary window glass, and when it does break it falls into small, blunt pieces rather than shards. Laminated glass holds together when it cracks. Polycarbonate panels shrug off hail better than either, though they scratch more easily and look a little less like glass up close.

None of those is hail-proof, and no door is. What makes a glass door practical here is that a broken panel can usually be replaced on its own, without touching the rest of the section, let alone the door.

Glass holds heat less well than a foam-filled steel door, and it's worth knowing that before choosing one for an attached garage. On a bitter morning a single-pane door lets the garage run colder, and moisture from a car coming in wet can frost on the inside of the panels.

Insulated glass and tight seals close most of that gap. If the garage is heated, or shares a wall with a bedroom or the kitchen, insulated panels and a new bottom seal are the ones we'd suggest. If it's a detached garage used for storage, single-pane glass is often fine.

A glass door is lovely from the street at dusk and just as see-through at night, when the garage lights are on and everything inside is on display. For a garage that faces the street, frosted or tinted panels keep the look without the view.

Some people keep the top row clear for daylight and frost the lower sections, where the eye lands first. The choice is made at the estimate, with the samples in front of you.

A lot of the glass doors we hang go on garages that do a second job. A home gym gets daylight and a view of the driveway without the door standing open in February. A woodshop or a car project gets light to work by on short winter afternoons. A garage that opens onto a patio becomes part of the yard on summer evenings.

Each of those uses points to different glass. A gym or a shop that's heated wants insulated panels and good seals; a space used mostly in summer does fine with single-pane glass. Say how the garage is used when we come to measure, because it changes the recommendation more than the look does.

A glass door is ordered to the opening, so the order of things matters.

1. Measure the openingWidth and height at several points, the headroom and the side room, and a look at the jambs and header.
2. Pick the frame and glazingFinish, glass type and the layout of clear and frosted panels, all written into a free estimate.
3. Order and scheduleThe door is built to the measurements, and you hear the delivery date when it's ordered.
4. Hang, balance and set upSections hung, springs wound for the real weight, new seals put on, the opener tuned, and the safety reverse shown working.

Aluminum sounds light, but a door full of glass usually weighs more than a plain steel door of the same size. The springs have to be chosen for that weight and wound to it, or the opener ends up carrying the door on every trip.

An older opener that was barely managing a hollow steel door may not be up to the new one. The technician checks before the order goes in and tells you whether your opener stays or should be replaced at the same visit, so you aren't paying for a second trip later.