PriWatt film on bathroom windows eight feet from a public beach path
Eight feet
That is the distance between the bathroom windows of this house and the public path people take to the beach. The owner had bought the house for the view and then discovered that the room with the best of it was the one room he could not use.
PriWatt film went onto four panels, three of 21 square feet and one of 8, in two days including the drive up from Miami.
Why the usual answers all fail here
This is the case where every conventional option loses the thing the house was bought for, and they are worth going through, because a homeowner will have been offered all four.
| Option | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| Obscure or acid-etched glass | The view, permanently. It is the one window in the house you would never choose to frost |
| Static privacy film | The same, plus it is the wrong productan applied frost is not switchable and does not come back |
| Blinds or a shade | The view whenever it is down, and in a bathroom eight feet from a footpath that is most of the time. Also fabric, in a wet room |
| Shutters | The view, the daylight, and the elevation |
| Switchable film | Nothing, for the hours nobody is in the room |
The last line is the argument in one row. The default state is a window; the private state exists for the minutes it is needed and then stops. Nothing has been added to the room and nothing has been permanently removed from the glass.
What a bathroom adds to the specification
- Which state it holds with no power. In a bathroom the answer is private, which is normal mode, so an outage closes the room instead of opening it
- Moisture at the edges, so the perimeter is sealed with non-conductive silicone and not left as a cut line
- Where the switch goes, and whether it should be reachable from inside the room only
- Whether the pane is toughened, because a window at that height in a wet room usually has to be; film does not change what it is rated as
The first is the one that separates a bathroom from every office on this site. An office wants reverse mode, clear when nothing is switched on. A bathroom wants the opposite, and the reason is not about energy.
Where a room is genuinely wet and not merely humid, inside a shower enclosure instead of beside one, the product changes: the switchable layer is laminated between two panes instead of applied to one. See shower and wet rooms.
Seventy-one square feet, and what that costs
Four panels totalling 71 square feet is a small job by the standards of the rest of this site, and small jobs are where the pricing question is asked most bluntly. Two things are worth knowing before asking.
Several small panels cost more per square foot than a few large ones: the same area with more edges, more busbars and more terminations. And a site visit is a site visit whether the job is 70 square feet or 700: this one took two days largely because Daytona is a drive from Miami.
The published ranges per product, and the items a per-square-foot figure leaves out, are on pricing.
Specified on this project
PriWatt PDLC switchable film
Self-adhesive film applied to glass already in the building. Private unpowered, clear when switched.
Residential
Bathrooms, glazed stairwells, terraces and railings.
Switchable windows
Exterior glazing, where solar gain matters as much as privacy.
A project like this one
A bathroom, a ground-floor room, or any window that is overlooked from close enough to matter. PriWatt makes the glass and the film in Pompano Beach, Florida, and quotes every project off its own drawings. Send dimensions, or a photograph with the sizes written on it. No drawings yet? Take the call instead.
