Icy Crystals Like Feathers Inside A Bay Window

It’s not too surprising that the garage windows freeze up with ice crystals when it’s super cold outside. It doesn’t get cold enough in the garage to freeze a bowl of water for the outdoor cats, but it’s not heated either.

What is surprising is that the bay window in the Great Room gets frosty. You know it’s cold outside baby when the bay window freezes up moisture on the inside!

Frosty Window On A Frigid Morning
Frosty Window On A Frigid Morning

Without plunking down a sum of coin for a set of thermal curtains to keep out the cold, we came up with a lightweight method of insulating the window side of the great room. It was an inexpensive way to ‘make curtains’ without covering up the bay window completely.

The Great Room has hardwood flooring and lots of wood trim plus a huge beam that runs the length of the room. We loved the wood look and hated to cover it up with curtains or take away the lovely sitting area for the kitties (and us!) to look outside by hanging a large swath of material in front of everything.

Two one-inch thick Styrofoam sheets were glued together to boost the insulating properties and then fabric was cut to fit and glued to the boards, as we call them. The fabric-covered boards are like lightweight curtains that can be left in place to block out the cold (or the sunlight and its heat in the summer) or moved one at a time to allow as much or as little daylight into the room as desired with maintaining an enjoyable temperature in the room.

On the coldest mornings you can see how well the boards insulate the room from the cold. Move aside one of the boards in the early morning, and if its down into the teens outdoors there will likely be ice crystals on the inside of the bay window.

Frosty Window Feathers
Frosty Window Feathers

I thought it was pretty dry indoors, but moisture from the room is obviously high enough to allow ice crystals to form.

Last year in January (8 Jan 2015) the conditions were right for capturing photos of a heavy frost that formed on the window panes.

Frost Is Fleeting
Frost Is Fleeting

The ice crystals looked like compound leaves, fern fronds, and feathers.

It’s very interesting to study the crystals. You can see many shapes among the chaos of seemingly random geometries. Faces, birds, leaves and lots of other things can be imagined in the frosty images.

Photographs had to be taken before the sun peeked over the trees for when that happened the sunbeams hitting the window melted the ice.

It was fun while it lasted. Reminds me of the fleeting nature of life…and so many phrases we use to describe that, “Do it now. Press on! Just do it. Move it! Move on.” You get the idea.

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