Skylight Glass

What We Manufacture for Skylights

Most of the skylight glass we produce leaves our facility as a sealed insulating unit, built from two or three panes with a warm-edge spacer and an argon or air fill. We can temper the outboard pane for impact resistance and laminate the inboard pane for fallout protection, since glass positioned overhead behaves differently than glass in a wall once it breaks. Low-E coatings, tints, and patterned glass round out the options we fabricate in-house.

You Specify, We Manufacture

Skylight requirements vary with the application and the jurisdiction. Glass that meets code in Langley or Abbotsford may not meet code in Vancouver, and we often do not know where or how a unit will finally be installed. For that reason, we manufacture to the specification on your order. Confirming that a glass makeup suits the application and the local code is your responsibility.

That arrangement suits our customers because they know the requirements of their own projects better than anyone. Send us a clear specification covering dimensions, quantities, glass type, coatings, spacer, and gas fill, and we will build exactly what it says.

What Skylight Specifications Typically Cover

Skylights sit in a different corner of the building code than a typical window. The North American Fenestration Standard (AAMA/WDMA/CSA 101/I.S.2/A440) names unit skylights, roof windows, and tubular daylighting devices specifically, and it sets the Performance Grade and Design Pressure ratings a skylight assembly needs to carry wind and snow load. Those ratings belong to the finished assembly, so the glass makeup is one input among several. Your engineer or fabricator decides what the assembly requires, and we work from the specification you send.

Safety glazing under CAN/CGSB-12.1 governs how glass behaves on impact, but it does not, on its own, address broken glass above someone’s head. That gap is why a laminated inboard pane is a common choice for skylights and other overhead glazing such as canopies: the interlayer holds the fragments together if the pane breaks. We laminate to whatever interlayer and thickness your order specifies.

British Columbia holds skylights to their own energy standard rather than folding them into window requirements. The provincial equipment regulation sets a maximum U-value of 2.90 W/m²·K for skylights of any frame material, and ENERGY STAR Canada’s threshold runs tighter still at 2.29 W/m²·K for qualifying products. Skylight area also feeds into the whole-building energy model under the BC Energy Step Code. Requirements change, so confirm the current figures for your project, then build your order from the spec sheets in our resource library.

Built for BC’s Weather

Overhead glazing meets BC’s weather differently than a vertical window does. On the coast and through the Lower Mainland, wind-driven rain puts the emphasis on durable edge seals and long-term drainage performance, since a skylight has nowhere to shed water except down and out. In the Interior and the north, snow load and cold-weather condensation resistance carry more weight, which is where a lower U-value and a well-chosen spacer system earn their keep. Each roof calls for its own makeup, and our customers choose it before they order.

Built for Volume, Delivered on Our Own Trucks

Three fully automated sealed unit machines run at our Langley facility, and we clean both down every day before production starts. That daily discipline keeps optical clarity and cavity cleanliness consistent across long production runs.

We keep our staff lean and our machinery busy on production runs, which lets us offer our best possible pricing to our highest-volume customers.

Delivery runs on our own fleet. Our trucks are larger than most, so they are designed for the big parking lots of our customers and for large commercial job sites, and several are fitted with cranes. They are not suited to tight residential streets, so plan your delivery around a site with room for them to maneuver. With our harp racking systems, insulated units come off the truck in groups instead of one at a time, so your crew is not digging through a buried stack for the piece they ordered.

Certified to Standards That Matter

Our facility carries SGCC certification for safety glazing and IGCC certification for insulating glass. Under IGCC certification, an independent body runs periodic accelerated laboratory tests and carries out unannounced inspections, and that oversight supports the consistency of the sealed units we manufacture. Our safety program has earned recognition from the Manufacturing Safety Alliance of BC through our OSSE certificate.

Who We Supply

Our customers are experienced glass professionals who order to their own specifications. Our best fit is the high-volume buyer: skylight and window manufacturers who need dependable output they can build a production schedule around, and large commercial glazing companies that order runs for big job sites. We work with trade customers only and do not sell to the public.

Why Experienced Glass Buyers Choose PFG Glass

We perform cutting, tempering, laminating, and IGU assembly all under one roof, so a skylight glass order does not depend on several subcontractors hitting their marks in sequence. That in-house control keeps one team responsible for the glass from the first cut to the truck leaving our yard. We have run our Langley facility for over three decades, and that history shows in how efficiently we move high-volume work through it.