We have an 1898 Victorian house and invited a Marvin Window salesman over to give us a quote on replacing old sash windows with new sash kits. Wow! So much for saving money with sash kits! Marvin sash kits are expensive so we are still shopping around at this point. We contacted a company called Kolbe & Kolbe but their people said we have no distributor in our region of the country. Any sash kit company leads would be helpful.

TF,
The kits are pricey, I'll grant you that. My guess is you will discover most are priced about the same.

MY home is from the 1970s and the window is a 36x36 with 3 horizontal sashes 12x36. I think the brand is a Lockmaster. I need to purchase the middle and the bottom sashes. can you help or direct me. thank you. david

The best option is always to repair the sash. It's a lot cheaper and maintains the integrity of the home. You will find that the sash is probably not as bad as you think. Read the department of Interior Preservation Brief 9 on The Repair of Historic Wooden Windows before you start. It has a lot of good information.
If the joints are loose inject epoxy and pin them with hard wood dowels. use a wood stabilizer and epoxy filler to repair dry rot. I suggest Bondo autobody filler. It's a little difficult to work with but is better than most wood putties. You should definitely replace all weather stripping with new spring bronze. It may be hard to find locally but it's easy to find on the Internet. Replacement windows are not that much more energy efficient than a properly sealed wood sash and it's likely you wouldn't even recover the cost of replacement.

check a company called BI-GLASS. they dont only fix old windows, but help so they function properly. the company also can make the old window energy sufficent, while keeping the historic look to your home. i know some one who had this done along with some insulation and his energy bill went down 30percent the windows look great, but keep there old appeal. if you were to get something threw pella, anderson , or a sash company you would pay 3x as much.

so much disinformation...

a) even if you buy wooden windows to replace old ones with, new wood isn't as dense or as resilient as old growth wood, so don't expect new windows to be better than your old ones.

b) if you opt for vinyl or aluminum, you can forget about energy savings making the expense worthwhile, wood is a better insulator than vinyl and aluminium isn't an insulator at all, so no matter how many panes of glass you put in you won't be gaining much if anything.

c) window replacement will not make a noticable difference in your utility bills unless the old windows are completely broken or otherwise do not close all the way. if they do, it'll take decades to pay for those new windows in power bill savings. if they don't, the frames aren't square, so new windows in the same frame will have the same problem as the old windows.

d) old double-hung windows will likely have grooves cut in the frame for the sashes to slide in. those are not easily hidden, so replacements will look bad at best, and why would you want to get rid of that? wood interlocking with wood against metal weather stripping creates a better seal than anything a new window jamb will provide, and will last 10x as long.

e) if your house is over 100 years old you likely still have plaster walls which are an infinitely better sound barrier than drywall, i fail to see how spray foam will make them so much better. if your inside trim around the frame is flush against the frame and into the plaster we're back to our previous point...wood is an insulator, there will be no energy savings from putting spray goop behind wood that's sealed on the inside.

old houses are not new houses. the reason the house in the article is still standing and inhabitable after 100 years is because it was built with better materials and better designs than new construction is. replacing functional windows with new ones helps window salesmen, not homeowners.

What ever happened to good old fashioned American ingenuity? Seems like companies geared towards improving existing sash windows have gone by the wayside in favor of so called energy star rated replacements. There used to be sash assemblies that would fit in the jamb and not only provide counter balance, but also seal via a groove milled along the length of the sash. Many such products can be found in the U.K. but not here. Even brass weather stripping is hard to find in our so called "home centers"- where the sales clerk knows as much about building products as your trash pickup guy. Often, the result is a wasted two hours going to these places and coming home frustrated and turning to the web and order stuff online.