Very bad things you should NEVER do to your window glass at home

Bad Thing #1: Taping shit to the window glass.

Getting adhesives off glass is time-consuming and you risk damaging the glass each time you do it. I once complained to my dad about having too much sunlight in my bedroom (my windows face east) and his solution was to coat them with multiple sheets of thin, light-colored decorative wallpaper. It sort of helped, but it made my room feel like a solitary confinement cell. If you also have too much light in your bedroom, don't ask my dad for advice - get blinds.

If you avoid doing Bad Thing #1 in life, then the rest of this post won't apply to you. However, if you're interested in learning about how much badly you can fuck up your windows following your single biggest mistake, keep reading.

Bad Thing #2: Using a canister stove as a blow torch to loosen the adhesive stuck to your glass.

I finally got sick of looking at the ugly wallpaper in my room today and decided that I was going to spend an hour removing it. I wanted my windows wallpaper free. An hour later, I was hunched over on the edge of my bed in my room with a tiny metal scraper resting in my right hand. At that point, I've already tried a number of liquid solvents to soften and loosen up the wallpaper: water, water with vinegar, windex, and even peanut butter (trust me, it's a thing). None of it worked. The wallpaper was dried, thin, flaky and married to the glass. 

Feeling frustrated, I turned to fire because heat is known to break sticky bonds. I started out small with a stove lighter to heat up tiny spots on the glass with the most stubborn wallpaper. This worked really well and got me excited. However, the lighter kept going out and the process was painfully slow because the flame was so small. So how do I add more heat and do it across a greater surface area without adding more lighters? Well, one popular option is a heat gun. I've seen my girlfriends dad use it on a sticky label once and it was very effective. Unfortunately, I don't own one and I didn't feel like going out to buy one. What's the closest thing I have to a heat gun? A blow dryer. So I plugged in my girlfriends blow dryer and started blasting the glass with it. Five minutes later, I realized the blow dryer wasn't generating enough heat so that wasn't much help. 

I need more then hot air. I need fire. And that's when I thought, "What if I had a blow torch"? Well, I don't. But I do have a canister stove that my girlfriend and I bought for a camping trip that I can probably use as a blow torch. So I unpacked my canister stove, lit it up, and held it up to the glass. It was working! The stuff was coming off fast (and turning into ash in the process). I was like, this is amaz - *CRACK*. Shit, that was my glass. F************.

Turns out there's this thing known as "thermal stress break" that can happen to glass surfaces. Basically, glass expands when heated and shrinks when cooled. When there's a change in heat and that change is not transferred uniformly across a glass surface (in this case, it was a lot of heat concentrated in a single area), one part of the surface will attempt to expand and that creates stress between the heated area and the rest of the glass known as thermal stress. There's a limit to how much thermal stress a piece of glass can withstand before there's a thermal stress break and my glass clearly had a thermal stress break.

Did I stop there? I wish I did. 

Bad Thing #3: Ignoring physics by pouring boiling water onto the glass.

Yup, it got worse. I didn't want to use the canister again because it just generated too much heat in a concentrated area. I did some more research and came across a few articles of people using boiling water to successfully remove wallpaper from their walls. Interesting. At this point I knew that using heat works really well - but only up to a point when it comes to glass. I didn't know what that point was but I soon found out that it was far lower than boiling point.

First, I learned how to remove a double-hung window sash so that I could remove my uncracked top window and use it in my boiling water attempt. After I got it down, I brought the sash into my bathroom and set it down with the glass horizontal to the floor while my water was boiling. Once my water finished boiling, I brought it into the bathroom in a pot and then slowly poured it over the glass and ...

That's it. No more ideas. Time to get new window sashes and blinds.