All About Sunrooms: Bringing Outdoors Inside your Home
Sunrooms go by different names depending on your location and your builder. It can be called Florida room, patio room, sun porch, conservatory, greenhouse and garden room. This room will bring your outdoors into your indoors. Modern building inventions and innovations have gotten rid of this room’s past problems like leaking and heat loss.
Sunrooms will allow you to enjoy your outdoors even if it is raining outside. You can also soak up the heat while sitting on your favorite chair while sipping your morning coffee. You can also experience the feel of the outdoors without actually going outside. You can stay away from the bugs and the pollens while enjoying the view of your garden, the forest and even the ocean, depending on the location of your sunroom and your home. A sunroom unifies the idea of absorbing nature at the same time being comfortable.
No matter how each call it, your sunroom will depend on your budget, how will it be used and the style and design of your house. There are a lot of choices to be made like will it be a part of the house or closed off by a door, will it be insulated or not, will it be on or off a foundation, will it have glass ceiling or glass roof and will it have operable or inoperable windows. These are only among the choices to be made if you will build a sunroom. There are also pre-fabricated sunrooms but there are also custom-made to suit your needs.
It has been called many names but what really is a sunroom? Technically, a room can be called a sunroom if at least 40% of its walls is glazing or glass. There are also two recognized types of sunrooms; those that are subject to energy requirements and those that are not. Those that are not subject to energy regulations must be thermally isolated from the rest of the house, closed off by a door and neither heated nor air conditioned by the existing system. These type of sunrooms are also called three-season rooms.
Sunrooms that are subject to energy regulations are sunrooms that are attached to the house all year round and must be heated during winter and cooled during summer because it must be comfortable to stay in there all year round. This type of sunroom will require insulated glass, coated glass or polycarbonate panels.
With so many things to consider in having a sunroom, you might be overwhelmed but if you ask any sunroom owner, he will tell you right away that it will be worth all the trouble.
