Do any of you have warm conservatory? How?

[Nochristmasbreak]

I love my conservatory but it's ice cold in winter, despite a radiator.

What would be best to warm it up?

Putting a roof on it? (And blocking out the lovely light)

Under floor heating?

Adding blinds all the way around? (again blocking out the light)

Adding another radiator?

Our conservatory is 2 small walls and 1 tall wall. The tall wall has a large radiator across it. It heats the room up really well. We also have the doors open to the rest of the house (dining room and kitchen) so the heat levels out. We have fitted blinds on all the vertical windows but none on the roof (which is self cleaning glass not plastic roof).
We do have a tiled floor that is really cold currently, but because the room is a playroom we have covered most of the floor in a rug and then large foam mats. You don't fee the cold through the rug and mats.

To keep it warm heat input has to be equal to or greater than heat loss. The problem with a conservatory is that due to all of the glass heat loss is usually huge.

There are two basic options. One is to reduce heat loss, for example by getting rid of some of the glass or changing it to a more heat-efficient type but that will probably require some major work and will entirely alter the nature of your conservatory.

Otherwise you can increase the heat input, which is probably going to be much easier although do bear in mind the greater running costs on your heating bill. Installing underfloor heating is one way but would be pretty disruptive. If it was me I would firstly bulk up the existing radiator, so for example if it is a dual-panel radiator I would install a triple one which would take up no more wall space but would throw out more heat. I would then install at least one more powerful radiator somewhere else in the conservatory. Not a big deal for a plumber. If you go down this route you should be able to find an online heat-loss calculator which will tell you how much heat your conservatory looses based on the area of glass it has. You can then look at the specification of radiators to ensure that you are putting at least that much heat into the conservatory. Or you could get a heating engineer in to do the calculation for you!

I have two radiators and underfloor heating and it's still pretty much an all day effort to get it warm enough to use of an evening. It does get marginally warmer if we leave the doors open to the lounge but makes everything else cooler and the conservatory is mainly the 4 year olds playroom at the moment so isn't used constantly. I'd love to rebuild it as a proper room but we need the light otherwise our living room and dining room would be very dark. (It's a very wide conservatory across both rooms.)

Ah, a wood burner is not an option then.

Honestly, our under floor heating is not enough to make it useable. We also have a slate roof, but I doubt that makes any difference.

My in laws manage to warm their conservatory by keeping the doors open and an oil filled radiator.

We use an oil filled radiator to heat our conservatory up. It is a 2500W one with 500W of that being a fan heater. We put the fan heater on until the radiator throws out some heat! It heats it up nicely.
The conservatory is south facing though and only has two walls of glass. It is about 3mx3m.

Roof with skylights. Transformative.

@Nochristmasbreak
Just the under floor heating, honestly it works really well, I do think the age of the conservatory makes a difference ours is only a couple of years old.
Today for example there is snow on the ground so we had the heating on in the whole house longer than normal, when we sat down for dinner it was so warm we were all changing our jumpers for t-shirts.
Ours looks similar to the garden room in the picture up thread except all our windows are to the floor, and we have a lantern roof.

I bought a house with a sunroom. It had double glazing and a fully insulated roof. It was freezing in the winter and roasting in the summer.
Only when I changed it to a garden room it became usable- best money I ever spent on the house.

@FelicityMingington you seem to know a lot about this stuff, so what about the oil radiator idea below? What that be a good solution?

I could make the radiator a double or triple and add another, that is a possibility. And adding under floor heating might not be too big a job as we want to change the flooring anyway.

@ShowOfHands do you need planning permission to change a conservatory to a garden room?

It depends on so many factors. We don't need planning permission, mostly because it's at the rear of the property and using the existing footprint. We will need it to be signed off as meeting building regs though.

Thought, our conservatory is only two walls of glass. So maybe it is warmer because of that.

We have a 20 foot x 14 foot glass room / conservatory on the back of the house it’s got electric underfloor heating and two radiators but was always freezing in winter.
This winter we bought an oil filled plug in radiator from Amazon (the biggest one they had,£70) and it’s been incredible.
We can now use it all day and it’s been amazingly warm and toasty .I’ve switched off the underfloor heating as it’s eye wateringly expensive to run for no real benefit for us.hth.

We had a conservatory with blinds all the way around and it did very little in terms of keeping heat in.

We ended up pulling it down and replacing with an extension; if we couldn't have done this I would have removed it and compromised the space it was THAT cold in winter.

But it was very old, wooden with single pane glass so despite having a huge radiator it also made the hall that it was set off very cold too and in my opinion sucked the heat out of the house in general.

We just don't use it between October - May 🤣

My DMs conservatory is the cosiest room in winter, mainly because of the underfloor heating. It’s also off the kitchen which probably helps although DM doesn’t cook much anymore

We knocked down our conservatory and now have a extension/day room with large skylights and windows and underfloor heating so has the light you would get in a conservatory but it’s easier to keep warm

Really mixed reviews on the under floor heating.

Does everyone that has underfloor heating that warms the room well, also have it open plan, so another room is warming it too, like a kitchen?

Our conservatory joins on to our dining room with doors in between and makes the dining room cold, so not open plan.

I am going to research oil radiators as an option as I desperately want to sit out there, under the stars, but also not turn into an ice cube!

@spagbog5 could you sit in there in the evening and it be warm enough?

DD uses it as her playroom. We have carpet on the floor and an oil filled radiator and as long as that is on and I wear slippers and a warm jumper it is fine - I did grow up in an ancient house with large rooms and single glazing and unpredictable heating though!

Replace the plastic roof with a top quality glass one. Replace windows with top quality glass. We did ours a few years ago. Old conservatory was unusuable - hot in summer, cold in winter. Now it's got better quality glass all round, it's a lot better, we can now sit in it all year round. Just got a normal radiator in there which is fine - as warm as other rooms.

We just had a rubber roof put on ours, it's made such a difference. Also nice thick carpet and oil radiator, first year in forever I've been able to use it in winter. It is a through room onto the dining room so I think that helps and I put a dehumidifier in there too so there's no damp.

Smallish, old (at least 10 and probably more like 15-20 years old) south east facing conservatory with windows on three sides here. I had an absolutely ridiculous sized radiator installed on what was the house's external wall. It's enormous and not very pretty but it does the job! And providing the heating is on full blast, it's absolutely a usable room all winter now.

I generally only use it in the day, but have an oil free radiator in my office which has no central heating and it keeps it nice and cosy :)

We had the roof insulated and plastered inside and it's made a huge difference. Plus a big rug on the floor. We leave the internal doors open and its usable all year round now. Still plenty of light.

We have underfloor heating in ours and it is warm even in winter. Unless it is freezing outside we can generally turn it off after a few hours and it stays warm until 5ish when we close it up.

Mine’s warm.... in the Summer. So warm in fact that nobody can bear to be in there.
In winter it’s freezing.

About two weeks of the year we can use the space.