solar power heaters for porch/sun room

falabalamb

We are going to be building a new 3mx3m porch on our house, to replace an ancient and tiny one which seems to be made of nailed together plastic sheeting. This new porch will be as insulated as we can make it and built with a proper (flat) roof. We would like it to have some heating in it too, if possible this would cheap to buy, environmentally friendly and cheap to run. I was thinking about a solar powered heater of some sort. Does anyone have any ideas? Does such a thing even exist? Thanks

poppellerant

I'm not sure solar panels could power a heat at full power, in all honesty. Maybe your best best would be to have solar panels charging a large bank of batteries, which in turn would power a low wattage heater.

Ectophile

You could have a thermal (hot water) solar panel on the roof, connected to a radiator. But I can't imagine it would be any more effective than a glass roof, and it would be a lot more complicated and expensive.

27col

If the porch has enough roof to provide solar energy, then it is likely that there will be enough solar gain to provide some heat through the windows. Or am I missing the point somewhere. Anyway, why would you need to heat a porch. Seems a bit over the top to me.

Ebe_Scrooge

Taking a simplistic view, anything that can make use of solar power is only going to work when the sun is shining - which is when you won't be needing heating :-) And to rig up a system whereby a solar panel charges a battery, to be used later, is going to be very expensive - and not that efficient anyway. That's why they have these huge hydro-electric storage plants - that's a far more efficient way to store unused energy than a bank of batteries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity if you're curious :-)

falabalamb

Hi, thanks for your help everybody, seems like it's not really possible then. BTW the reason I want to heat a porch is because it is going to be 3m by 3m so effectively a sun room/porch/conservatory. I would quite like to use it as a room from time to time. It's going to be as insulated as we can make it so shouldn't take much to heat. According to building regs you cannot heat a porch or conservatory using the same method of heating used in the rest of the house (or have I misunderstood?). Oh well, electric heater it is then

StuC75

What others are saying is that when it is warm enough for solar purposes then any conservatory \ glass roof is likely to be warm enough.. if anything its likely to need cooling at that time!.

when it needs heating is winter time. when not much solar power would be generated..

I would assume that most would have it on central heating where that feed can be isolated from the main system \ loop.. Mind you my conservatory is years old so probably pre-dates that..