Storm PanelsOak Island, NC

Oak Island, Brunswick County

What storm panels cost on Oak Island, and who should actually buy them

Aluminum storm panels on Oak Island are $22/sq ft installed and clear polycarbonate panels are $26/sq ft. Both include the permanently mounted tracks, the panels, the wing-nut hardware, the permit and a per-opening design pressure calculation. A house with twelve openings averaging fifteen square feet is around $3,960 in aluminum.

Certification is not where these differ from anything else we sell. A panel in its track meets ASTM E1886/E1996 exactly as an accordion does, and an inspector looking at the finished opening cannot tell you which cost more. The entire difference sits in the hour before the weather, not in the weather.

Oak Island holds more addresses than any other place on our list, and a great many of them belong to people whose main house is somewhere else. So the question that decides this product is not about the product. It is: name the person who will be at this address, with a drill and an afternoon, when a storm is four days out. If that name does not exist, panels leave you believing the house is covered when it is not, which is a worse position than owning nothing.

Where they are exactly right is the owner who is here, or a manager who is, and a budget with a hard edge. Every opening covered at $22 beats half the house covered at $38, and the rating is the same on both. That trade is the entire case for this product and it is a good one when somebody does the work.

The clear polycarbonate version at $26 earns the extra four dollars more often than people expect. Aluminum turns every protected room completely dark and outages out here run long. Clear panels keep the daylight and let you see what the water is doing, which matters more on an island than it does inland.

Storage is a question for the measure, not for delivery day. Most houses here have ground-level enclosure under the pilings and that is usually the right place, as long as the panels are somewhere reachable in the dark with the power off.