A lot of Orem sits in subdivisions built between the seventies and the nineties, and those houses are now at the age where original windows stop working as a group. It is rarely one bad unit. Seals give out within a few years of each other because they were installed in the same month and have taken the same sun ever since. Homeowners notice three or four foggy panes in a season and assume they got unlucky. They did not. The house is aging on schedule. Call 801-644-9000 to talk it through.
Insulated glass units have a service life, and every unit in a house that went up in one construction cycle started that clock on the same day. So the failures cluster. One window fogs in January, two more show up by summer, and by the following winter you are counting them. This is the most common call we get from Utah County, and it is not a defect story. It is what happens when identical assemblies get identical exposure for three decades and then start reaching the end together.
That pattern is actually useful, because it makes planning possible. Instead of reacting one unit at a time, you can look at the whole house, sort the openings by how bad they are, and decide what gets handled now and what can wait a season. Homeowners who do that spend less time on the phone and less time letting strangers into the house. Homeowners who wait for each individual failure end up managing the same project six separate times, with a different crew showing up for each round.
Fog or haze trapped between the panes means the insulated glass seal has failed and moisture is inside the assembly. That is a glass problem. It says nothing definitive about the frame, the hardware, or how the window operates. In some houses the vinyl or wood frame is in fine shape and only the sealed glass units need attention, which is a smaller job than full replacement. In others the frames are tired too, and there is little sense in putting new glass into something that gets pulled out in a few years anyway.
So the useful question is not whether the glass failed, but what else went with it. Walk the house and check whether the sashes still lock cleanly, whether the balances hold a window open, whether the weatherstripping is still soft, and whether any sill feels spongy under thumb pressure. If the answers are good, ask about glass-only options. If several answers are bad, replacement is a fair recommendation, and any contractor should be willing to explain which category your house falls into and why.
Replacing every window at once is efficient for the crew and hard on the household. There is a middle path most people prefer: order everything together so it is all built from one set of measurements, then install by zone. Bedrooms one day, main floor the next, basement after that. The house never fully opens up, pets and kids stay manageable, and you only clear furniture out of the rooms in play. Ask any bidder whether they schedule that way, because plenty of crews will if you request it.
The other thing to settle in advance is what happens between removal and install at each opening. On a normal day a unit comes out and the new one goes in within the hour, so nothing sits open overnight. Weather and a missing part can change that. Ask what the plan is if a unit shows up damaged, how they secure an opening if a room has to wait, and who handles the interior trim and exterior caulking afterward. Those answers separate a real schedule from an optimistic one.
More often it is age and shared history. Windows installed together and facing the same weather tend to fail within a few years of each other, so clustered fogging is normal in houses of this era. Fog between the panes means the sealed glass unit lost its seal and moisture got in. That is a glass issue rather than proof the whole window is finished, so have someone assess the frames separately before deciding.
No. Measuring and ordering everything together is smart, because it locks in one set of dimensions and one production run, but installation can be split across rooms or floors so you are not living around open walls. Some homeowners even split the ordering across seasons. The tradeoff there is that pricing and lead times can shift between rounds, so make that choice deliberately rather than by default.
Longer than most people expect, and it varies with the manufacturer's backlog and the time of year. Anything built to a non-standard size is made to order, so nothing is sitting on a shelf waiting. Ask for the current estimate in writing when you sign, ask what happens if a unit arrives damaged, and expect a remeasure before the order goes out. Scheduling an install before units arrive is how projects go sideways.
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