A glass shower door can break even if no one s in the bathroom.
Tempered glass shower door shattered.
Tempered glass safety alert tempered glass is a technology that is designed to fail safely.
Shower doors spontaneously shattering sometimes while a person is showering resulting in wet naked injured people.
And it s called an inclusion.
Yet there s a rare and terrifying problem.
6 2012 larry kucharik 64 of oak park ill.
The other reason is occasionally there s an impurity in the glass when it was melted from sand.
Was having his morning coffee when his wife alerted him to a strange noise.
They went upstairs to investigate and in their empty bathroom they found their glass shower door inexplicably shattered and lying in perilous shards all over the bathroom.
The reason tempered glass spontaneously shatters it might have a flaw in the edge or a scratch in the surface.
Most contractors agree that the problem lies in the tempered glass that is used in shower doors.
Meaning if you were to drop the glass on its side it would instantly shatter.
During the heating process the glass becomes more resistant to a direct impact but much more susceptible to a side impact.
Consumer products that use tempered glass should rupture into small fragmented pieces and not into larger shards if.
It takes a serious impact to break and when it does it shatters into small granular chunks instead of large shards.
This makes the glass much stronger against direct impact but weakens it against side impact.
It s called a spontaneous blow and it can happen because the glass is tempered.
That happened to a nine year old.
But while this is the greatest strength of tempered glass it is also a weakness.
The glass is designed with safety in mind.
Ironically the center tension zone engineered into tempered glass through the quenching process is also what makes it so vulnerable to catastrophic breakage.
That s because the tempering process used to create safety glass causes it to break into very small pieces rather than large sharp shards.
Tempered shower glass most glass shower doors are put through a process called tempering where its tensile strength is altered during a heating process.
Safety glazings are commonly required for sliding glass doors shower doors and patio furniture.
Delta shower doors are made with tempered glass much like the glass used in automobiles and airplanes.