Every Milgard line we carry, and who each one is actually for.

Start with the frame material, not the series name

Milgard’s line-up looks more complicated than it is. There are three frame materials — vinyl, fiberglass and aluminium — and the series names sit underneath those. Pick the material that suits your house and exposure first, and the series choice mostly makes itself.

Vinyl insulates well and costs the least, and it is the right answer for most West Valley houses. Fiberglass barely expands in heat, so it holds a dark exterior colour and handles oversized openings without bowing. Aluminium is the narrowest frame and the strongest, but it conducts heat, which matters a great deal on a west elevation and is why California’s energy code treats it carefully.

The vinyl lines

Style Line, the V250, is the value line: narrow frames, more glass for the same opening, and a flush fin that retrofits over an existing aluminium frame without touching your stucco. It is the most common thing we install.

Trinsic, the V300, is the thinnest vinyl frame Milgard makes. Choose it where the view is the point — hillside lots, rear elevations, anywhere the frame is competing with what is behind it.

Tuscany, the V400, has a heavier beveled frame, better hardware, and the widest choice of shapes and grid patterns, which is why it usually ends up on the street-facing side of the house.

Fiberglass and aluminium

C700 Series is painted fiberglass — the line Milgard used to call Ultra. It is the line to pick for a dark exterior colour in Valley heat, for very large openings, and for a full-house replacement you intend to keep rather than resell.

A250 Thermally Improved Aluminum gives you the narrowest sightlines and the biggest spans. It is also the frame most houses here are replacing rather than buying, and there is a real energy-code reason for that — worth reading before you specify it.

Specialist lines

Quiet Line is built for sound rather than heat: laminated glass and a heavier assembly for houses under a flight path, near the 101, or on a busy street.

Moving Glass Walls are the multi-panel doors that stack or pocket into the wall. These usually involve structural work, and we will tell you that before you fall in love with the idea.

Patio doors run across several of these lines — sliding, French swinging and the multi-panel systems. There is a separate page on patio doors covering what fails, when a repair beats a replacement, and which line does what.

We also carry Ply Gem, whose Pro200 series covers a lot of the same ground as Style Line at a similar price point.

What counts as efficient here

Los Angeles sits in the Southern climate zone. To carry the ENERGY STAR v7 label in this zone a window has to hit a U-Factor of 0.32 or lower and a Solar Heat Gain Coefficient of 0.23 or lower, with air leakage no worse than 0.3 cfm/ft². Patio doors with more than half their area in glass are held to 0.28 and 0.23.

Those are the numbers to check any quote against, ours included. For reference, the Trinsic V300 build we quote most often is rated 0.25 and 0.20 — comfortably inside both. Every window ships with those figures printed on an NFRC sticker in the corner, and we leave it there until you have read it.

The catalogs

These are Milgard’s and Ply Gem’s own brochures. They are useful for shapes, grid patterns and colour options, and they are large files — the biggest is over 5 MB, so they are worth opening on wi-fi rather than data.

What they will not tell you is which line suits your specific openings and exposure. That is what the estimate is for, and it is free.

• V250 Style Line (PDF, 1.8 MB)
• V300 Trinsic (PDF, 1.0 MB)
• V400 Tuscany (PDF, 0.9 MB)
• C700 Fiberglass (PDF, 2.1 MB)
• A250 Thermally Improved Aluminum (PDF, 2.0 MB)
• Moving Glass Walls — VX350, AX450, AX650 (PDF, 2.7 MB)
• Energy efficiency and glass options (PDF, 4.8 MB)
• Ply Gem Pro200 Series (PDF, 0.9 MB)

Every line here is available as a retrofit, and we are an authorized Milgard dealer with frames mounted on the floor in Canoga Park.