Walk into a big-box store and the window well cover on the shelf is a clear moulded plastic dome. Ours are framed steel or aluminum. They cost different money and they fail in different ways, and which is right depends mostly on how much snow lands on your house.
What a plastic cover is good at
Three real advantages, and they are not small ones.
It is cheap. A stock dome is a fraction of the price of a made-to-size framed cover. If the well is a standard size and the budget is tight, that matters.
It is light. One hand lifts it. For a window you open, or a well you clear out often, that is genuinely easier to live with.
It lets light through. Clear plastic keeps the basement bright, which is usually the whole reason the window is there.
Where plastic gives out
Snow. This is the big one in most of Canada. A moulded dome is not built to carry a load. A metre of wet spring snow sitting on one will bow it, and a bowed dome either cracks or pops its fixings. Anywhere with real accumulation — the snowbelt, the Quebec interior, northern Ontario, the prairies — this is not a maybe, it is a matter of which winter.
Cold. Plastic gets brittle as the temperature drops. A dome that would flex in September shatters in January if somebody steps on it or a branch comes down.
Sunlight. Clear plastic yellows and goes chalky with UV exposure. Expect a south-facing dome to cloud over within a few years, and the clouding comes with brittleness.
Sizing. Domes come in a handful of stock sizes. If your well is not one of them, you are packing the gap with something, and the gap is where the leaves go in.
Where steel gives out
In fairness, steel is not immortal either.
Weight. A steel cover is heavy enough that lifting it off is a two-hand job, and on a bedroom window that matters — somebody may need to push it up from inside the well. That is the case for aluminum, which is the same shape and frame but light enough for one person.
Rust, eventually. Galvanized steel holds up for decades but it is steel. Where a frame sits in standing water year after year, it will go before the same frame on a well that drains.
Price. Ours start at $350 and are made to your size. That is more than a dome off the shelf, and if the well is standard and the snow is light, the dome may genuinely be the better buy.
The honest comparison
A plastic dome is a three-to-five year part in most of this country and a one-winter part in the snow. A framed steel cover is a twenty-year part. Whether that is worth the difference depends on how long you are staying and how much snow you get.
A useful middle option is a framed cover with a clear panel rather than mesh — a metal frame that carries the load, with a clear sheet in it that passes daylight the way a dome does. That is available on every size we make.
Which to buy
Buy plastic if your well is a stock size, your winters are mild and largely rain — coastal British Columbia, say — and you want light and low cost.
Buy steel if snow piles up where you live, if the well is an odd size, if the cover is also there to stop somebody stepping into the hole, or if you would rather buy it once.
Buy aluminum if you want metal but the cover comes on and off often, or the window is a bedroom exit.
There is more on frame materials and clear panels in steel, aluminum or polycarbonate, and if you are still deciding whether you need one at all, start with do I need a window well cover.
Ours are made in Canada in 42 sizes — see the full range.