What windows/material for a brutal cold/hot/windy climate?

[MrBeardsley]

Good afternoon!

We bough a cabin in Colorado that needs all of the windows and doors replaced. We aren't driven as much by aesthetics as performance and we just want to find something durable that will hold up to the weather around here.

The weather gets very cold in the winter with lots of snow and high winds (think 30-50mph sustained for hours at a time). The other big issue is due to elevation and sun exposure, the window frames can get fairly hot, even in the winter if there isn't much wind. What I noticed in the spring was that the current window frames might be over 100 degrees in the sun and then 20 minutes later with a storm rolling through, they could drop to 30 degrees under cloud cover. So lots of thermal expansion and contraction.

We also want something with very little thermal gain, because the house acts like a greenhouse on still summer days, and there is no AC.

We don't ever want to paint these windows and would like a dark gray or black frame from the outside.

I've heard that fiberglass is the most dimensionally stable material, but I'm worried about the exterior being exposed to high UV and sun. What type of materials should I be looking at and what are the best brands for those materials?

PS: We'll be getting the whole place resided with vertical standing seam, so I would think we can look at just about any install type.

[Windows on Washington]

Fiberglass being the most dimensional stable material is a good talking point for the FG window industry. Wood is more stable as it pertains to temperature with about 1/10th of the expansion with temperature. That said, some of the super high efficiency units in the triple pane space will be in FG.