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Someone knocked on our door tonight for a free window audit from Statewide Windows. In addition to the free audit we get a $25 gasoline card. Sounds like a good deal to me since I spend nothing, get someone to tell me about energy efficiency, and they give me $25 in free gas. The company looks reputable online, so we’ll see how it turns out when they come to do the audit. I’ll update here.

Update October 22nd, 2005. A sales lady named Cindy came to the house and measured our windows and gave us a presentation on windows. The UniFrame window that only Statewide sells was very impressive in the demo, blocking a ton of heat (supposedly R10 value), and being very well made. We have a window in our downstairs bedroom that is too small to make code since it’s a slider, which only allows half the window opening to be used as an egress and the whole opening just barely would be big enough for code. We wanted to replace that anyway, but Cindy told us our upstairs bedrooms weren’t big enough for code. So we got price quotes to replace all those windows and expand our downstairs bathroom window. The quote looked really, really good, so Kim and I talked about it and decided to just get it done, especially since they offer a “success discount” of 11% if you place your order that night. However, she messed up her math. The quote ended up being about 70% more than the original. We were exhausted at this point as we had been talking windows for 4 hours and just wanted to go to bed so we agreed to the price knowing that we had three days to cancel the contract, so we just signed it and went to bed.

The next morning I measured the upstairs windows and found that they were just barely code. One of them had an opening that was just over 5.7 sq feet and the other was less than 5.7, but was on the ground floor and more than 5 sq ft. This code mistake and lack of knowledge, combined with the higher price that changed on us gave us a bad feeling and we decided to cancel the order. Kim called and said that we wanted to cancel and Cindy said okay, but didn’t bother to tell us that we had to send a notice of cancellation in by certified mail. It’s a good thing I read that before the date that I needed to make the decision.

Overall it seems like Statewide has a good product and is a good company, but the make a decision now sales tactics and pricing raising math errors were enough to make us reconsider doing business. Perhaps in the future after we’ve done some more research we’d consider statewide, but I have a feeling that their prices may be a little higher than I’m willing to spend.

Update October 25th, 2005 Despite calling Cindy twice to say that we wanted to cancel, faxing in a copy of the request to cancel, and sending a certified letter yesterday (which to be fair I doubt they’ve received until today), someone from Statewide today stopped by and put their sign in our yard and wants to setup a time to do the precision measuring of the windows. I’m hoping this is just a mistake in the paperwork and not another pushy business tactic.

Update November 1st, 2005 My money was all refunded no problem. I’m planning to shop around and get some more bids before I go any further with this project. I don’t know enough to make a good decision yet.