Egress Window Installation in Andover, Kansas

Egress window installation in Andover runs the same $3,500 to $6,500 as Wichita and is built to the same code, because Andover adopted it: Ordinance No. 1957 adopting and amending the Wichita-Sedgwick County Unified Building and Trade Code, effective May 13, 2025. What changes at the county line is the desk. Andover is Butler County, with a slice in Sedgwick, and its own Building & Inspections Department at 1609 East Central Avenue issues the permit and sends the inspector.

The Andover desk, and the licence change

Andover’s Building & Inspections Department enforces the building, residential, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing codes the city has adopted, and no work is authorized until the Building Official has issued the permit. Since June 28, 2025 the city has dropped its own contractor licence for most permits: the contractor holds a Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department (MABCD) licence and files a certificate of insurance naming the City of Andover as certificate holder. That is the arrangement we work under. The permit fee is Andover’s, itemized at cost; MABCD’s Table B does not price it.

The code Andover enforces

Because Ordinance 1957 adopts the Wichita-Sedgwick County UBTC, an Andover egress opening is measured against the Wichita amendment, not the bare model code:

• Net clear opening of 4.5 square feet with the window open and a 5.7-square-foot break-out area; 19 3/4 inches of height for hung and awning units; 17 inches of width for casements and sliders, 30 1/4 for hung.
• A permanently affixed ladder in any well deeper than 44 inches, rungs 12 inches wide, 3 inches out, 12 inches on center.
• A guardrail or a 20-psf-rated cover with an egress hatch on any well deeper than 30 inches.
• 12 inches of washed gravel under the entire well, or a tie-in to the foundation drain.

We size every window to clear the model 5.7 square feet as well, so the opening passes either reading. The full comparison is on the Wichita egress code page. Andover’s own amendments to the UBTC are the city’s, and we confirm them at the counter before ordering.

Andover’s basements, and why this town takes shelter seriously

Andover is a young suburb that grew fast: a major annexation in 1968, then 6,698 people in 2000, 11,791 in 2010, 14,892 in 2020, and an estimated 15,814 in 2023. That growth is mostly poured-foundation houses with full basements, often sold unfinished, and often with one builder egress opening sized to the original plan rather than to the two bedrooms a family frames downstairs later. Each new sleeping room needs its own opening; two bedrooms means two, and doing them in one visit prices well.

The other reason is history. On April 26, 1991 an F5 tornado came through Haysville, southeast Wichita, McConnell Air Force Base, and Andover. It killed 17 people, 13 of them at the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park in Andover, and destroyed more than 300 homes in town. About 200 Golden Spur residents who took refuge in the park’s underground storm shelter came out unhurt. On April 29, 2022 an EF3 hit Andover again, damaging the YMCA and more than a thousand buildings across Butler County, with three minor injuries. Sedgwick County Emergency Management’s guidance for a warning at home is the basement, a safe room, or the lowest and most interior room away from windows, and Andover families follow it. The basement is where you go. A code egress window, on the far side of the room from where you shelter, is how you get out afterward.

Soil and drainage

Andover’s ground is the same shale-derived clay as the rest of the metro. The Rosehill series, a smectitic silty clay NRCS calls very plastic and very sticky, has its type location in Butler County; it is Hydrologic Group D, very slow infiltration when wet, high shrink-swell. NOAA’s Wichita normals put 5.17 inches of rain on May and 4.93 on June. A window well without a gravel bed and an outlet fills, and Wichita’s 12-inch gravel rule, which Andover adopted, exists for exactly that reason. See covers and drainage.

Radon

Butler County, like Sedgwick, is EPA radon Zone 2. Test before you finish; the basement bedroom conversion page puts the test in the right place in the sequence.

Pricing and scheduling

Full installs $3,500 to $6,500, well replacements $1,000 to $3,000, window swaps $400 to $1,100, Andover permit itemized at cost. Details on the pricing page. Andover is east of Wichita; crews run there routinely, and dig season is most of the year with a 24-inch frost line. Request a free on-site measure and we will file with Andover’s desk.