Want to insulate conservatory roof

berlingirl

Our conservatory is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I am looking for advice and recommendations on companies that provide this service. Quality and price very important.

Doozergirl

I have friends who have simply got a suspended ceiling company to come in and install a false ceiling and then stuffed it full of insulation.

It must work as well as any of the more expensive but (imo) wasteful solutions. Better off with an extension than spending a fortune.

Davesnave

Complaining that your conservatory doesn't keep warm in winter and gets too hot in summer is a bit like saying that your Kia Picanto won't do 100mph or carry 5 people and all their stuff.

Sure, you can buy bits that make a car go faster, or bolt a trailer onto it, but the real problem of trying to make it go beyond its design parameters remains. It'll maybe be better, but the improvement will be marginal.

The same with a conservatory. You can put fake roof on, but it'll still not be an extension, and in summer you'll still bake if the structure was not made with enough ventilation in the first place.

You may even devalue the rest of your home, if the opaque roof is going to block light into the room behind and make it dark.

Your problem may be that you can't afford to replace the conservatory with a similar sized extension, which would be easier to keep warm and cool at different seasons. I can understand this, because I've come to the same conclusion with my property. Getting over the lost light issue would add another £20k to a rear extension, and that's £20k I'd rather keep for a rainy day.

So, I'm replacing an old conservatory and living with the idea that I might not use it much from December to March, which are roughly the months when the temperature inside doesn't match that of the house in main daylight hours. Tough!

I'll make sure it has adequate ventilation for summer, but I'll be under no illusion that this will also make it a haven for every flyng insect under the sun.

That's life and conservatories in a nutshell....imperfect.

Furts

Davesnave wrote: »

Complaining that your conservatory doesn't keep warm in winter and gets too hot in summer is a bit like saying that your Kia Picanto won't do 100mph or carry 5 people and all their stuff.

Sure, you can buy bits that make a car go faster, or bolt a trailer onto it, but the real problem of trying to make it go beyond its design parameters remains. It'll maybe be better, but the improvement will be marginal.

The same with a conservatory. You can put fake roof on, but it'll still not be an extension, and in summer you'll still bake if the structure was not made with enough ventilation in the first place.

You may even devalue the rest of your home, if the opaque roof is going to block light into the room behind and make it dark.

Your problem may be that you can't afford to replace the conservatory with a similar sized extension, which would be easier to keep warm and cool at different seasons. I can understand this, because I've come to the same conclusion with my property. Getting over the lost light issue would add another £20k to a rear extension, and that's £20k I'd rather keep for a rainy day.

So, I'm replacing an old conservatory and living with the idea that I might not use it much from December to March, which are roughly the months when the temperature inside doesn't match that of the house in main daylight hours. Tough!

I'll make sure it has adequate ventilation for summer, but I'll be under no illusion that this will also make it a haven for every flyng insect under the sun.

That's life and conservatories in a nutshell....imperfect.

I would add that roofs such as "Guardian" are dubious. I have yet to see technical data that convinces me of their suitability and I know countless installations are suspect. In a nutshell these products are a licence to print money and being promoted by snake oil salesmen and sales women.

I will give you two examples- both with neighbours of mine during the last year:

The first invited a local, recommended, long established conservatory company to their home. The problem was the leaking roof. The representative was a lady who was a Director, and wife of the other Director. There was no hard sell, or pressure, but the neighbours showed her the door because she did not know what she was talking about. This is important, because these neighbours know nothing about the building trade - they could simply see through the complete BS being spoon fed to them.

The second neighbour has a low cost, poorly built, and defective conservatory built around 25 years ago. The roof leaks, there is no ventilation and there are a multitude of problems . Basically it is life expired and needs demolition. Instead they listened to a snake oil salesman and have have paid a small fortune for a Guardian roof to be fitted. It is a certainty that were I to inspect it I would condemn it. But,as the saying goes, "Fools and their money are easily parted".

bouncydog1

We have the same issue - and are in the process of replacing all the glazing with thermally efficient pilkington glass. Also installing underfloor heating and a thermally efficient floior. Not the cheapest option, but a neighbour has done a similar thing and is very happy with the result. We simply don't want to lose the light and love being able to use it all year round. We currently have oil radiators in there but they're not big enough for the size of the room.

jakemillspaek

Polishing a turd springs to mind.
Our conservatory was built and I knew its strengths and weaknesses.
On a sunny winters day I open the conservatory into the house and use the natural heat.
Equally after Xmas dinner it is a joy to cool down in.
We do have a 3KW wall mounted electric heater which although expensive to run does the job nicely for special occasions.

27col

Conservatories are not classified as habitable rooms. Therefore they do not have any of the insulation values of conventional buildings. They are always going to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter.. To make their insulation properly effective requires that they be virtually rebuilt as a standard room. This is unlikely to happen to most of them.
The problem is that peoples aspirations are too high. Particularly because conservatory suppliers do not make the true facts clear in their sales literature. People think that they are buying extra usable space, but they seem to ignore the basic facts about lack of insulation in the method of construction, ie, that for large parts of the year, the temperature will be too hot or too cold.

rev229

We have a conservatory which we rarely used as either too hot or too cold as we always kept the door closed into the dinning room. However the last couple of years we have left the door open and it is now much more comfortable to use. It has a radiator and we have a small fan heater but don't really use that much.