Two of the breakage phenomena of glass panes applied in building and construction work are due to the thermal shock , or to the so-called "spontaneous" breakage by NiS inclusions. The aim of this paper is to analyse these two aspects. They are not correlated and they refer to different glass products: the thermal shock breakage is generally referred to annealed float glass, whereas the breakage due to NiS inclusion is specific of thermally toughened glass. Thermal shock breakage can be related to design mistakes, spontaneous breakage depends on batch contamination. Specific advice will be outlined to reduce these breakages in glass applications. In both of them, the main factor is solar irradiation that, in combination with the glass characteristics (in case of thermal shock), may induce the breakage of glass panes.
