After gently cooking last summer - can we keep our conservatory cool this year?

[KatieMac]

If so .....How?

Air con
Mechanical Ventolation


HELP PLEASE

[Ameriscot2005]

We have an air conditioner in our loft conversion. It works well and also provides heat in the winter.

[KatieMac]

Was it expensive

How big is your room

(if you don't mind me asking...)?

[Dingle]

KatieMac, is it south facing???

Do you already have blinds?

[Ameriscot2005]

Our room is about 18' x 18', and being in the loft, there is a high heat load through the roof. The air conditioner/heat pump cost £2000 fully installed.

You can get much smaller units for smaller rooms. The salesman visits beforehand to calculate your heat load and cooling requirements. If you don't require heat, it's quite a bit cheaper.

[KatieMac]

Yep - It was South and east facing - but we've put a wall where the east windows were.

We do have blinds (on the windows not the ceiling)

Problem is we have made it bigger.....

[KatieMac]

Thanks Ameriscot - I don't need heat (underfloor heating)

So - as my room is 28x12 - so fairly close in sq footage, but would need a bigger one as it's a conservatory (I presume)

[Dingle]

We paid £3k for roof blinds from Thomas Saunderson last year. It has reduced the heat and greatly reduced the glare. It still gets hot, don't get me wrong, but at least it is bearable most of the time now!

[KatieMac]

Dingle - how big is your roof - is it lean to or pent?

[Dingle]

The conservatory is about 4x4mtrs with Edwardian style roof. We have roof vents but only top openings on windows.
It has made a remarkable difference, but I don't know whether it has made £3k's worth of difference!

[KatieMac]

And it would be 2.25 times more expensive (on size)

HMMM - some thinking to be done...

I was hoping Roof vents and an extractor fan would work

[Dingle]

There are cheaper blinds, but to be honest we didn't think it was worth going cheaper. The quality of the material wasn't anything like what we now have and we needed it to reduce the heat, not to just cover the roof IYSWIM. Our original quote was about £12k!!
But at the end of the day we had just paid out all that money for a conservatory we couldn't use for a couple of months each year so £3k seemed almost justified.
We have also found that the heat in the winter is retained for longer. The room heats up OK with a rad and an additional small heater, but we found it very quickly got cold again because all the heat went straight out the roof! Again , it isn't brilliant, but vastly improved by the blinds.

[KatieMac]

The underfloor heating does prevent the heat going out the roof. If your feet are warm the rest of you is too.
But for the two rooms I would need 42ft by 12 ft's worth of blind - I bet that would be expensive.

In the smaller room I'm thinking of doing a DIY job with banners of linen (type) material on velcro to reduce glare

[onlyjoking9329]

we have electric roof windows in ours which helps
didnt fancy having a pole to open the roof windows cos i just know at least one of my kids would play quiditch with it

[KatieMac]

'Cos it's a lean to - the 'pole' is only 2ft 6 long and DH can open them without it ....however it is on a very high hook