Conservatory heating

Mageary

Can anyone advise the best heating for a large (5m x4m) conservatory. We had a Dimplex heater ( rest of house is gas) which was completely removed by a tenant when the house was rented previously. T

QrizB

This thread would be better in "Energy".

Is it a dwarf wall conservatory, or is it all glass?

born_again

What sort of roof?

mmmmikey

Hi @Mageary sorry to add more questions but it does make a big difference. If you can answer the questions then lots of suggestions will follow - I promise

My questions are:

1. How do often and when do you use the conservatory, e.g. every day as an extension to your living space, or just occasionally?

2. How is your main house heated?

btw - welcome to the energy forum

Scot_39

Another Q.

Did you open up the house wall to the conservatory, so its essentialkhban extension,  so it needs to be at living room or kitchen style temperature  year round or is it still seperated via reasonably insulated patio door type access ?.

Surely if your boiler is up to driving one - maybe two more - given its 20 sq m and with some construction / materials they can be quite lossy.

At least currently gas central heating due to gas c6p electric c25p /kWh costings - new radiator(s) with trvs that can be turned low - or smart ones programmed to - when not in use for frost protection but turned up to room comfort level could be cheaper to run.

Since you have gas I'll assume not on e7  - but are you instead perhaps on or considering an EV, so might be looking at a fixed tou ev tariff with cheap rates - of even some of the non ev tou tariffs -  if so nsh might be an option for cheaper per kWh electric - set to match its off peak times.  Modern ones are thermostat regulated and programmable.

But depends on how often and for how long you intend to use the space in autumn , winter and spring.

But if staying electric, just throwing it into the mix would infra-red work well when fit / in tandem with a cheap panel set for frost protection so heat the person not the full space - if not for regular all day but certainly occassional use hours a day ?. 

powerful_Rogue

Based on the limited details, if you haven't already and it's possible, get the roof insulated.

I used this company - https://conservatoryinsulationsuk.com/ 15 months ago and the difference it has made is amazing.

FreeBear

Scot_39 said:
Surely if your boiler is up to driving one - maybe two more - given its 20 sq m and with some construction / materials they can be quite lossy.

One of the rules for conservatories is they should not be connected to the main heating system. Another one is they should have an exterior grade door separating the space from the main house. If you do either, then the whole structure becomes an extension which may need planning permission and certainly building regulation compliance/approval.

A Dimplex type storage heater (or just a plain old convector/fan heater) would work. May be not that well, and be quite expensive to run. A more modern solution would be an air to air heat pump - Much cheaper to run in the winter, and could also be used for cooling in the summer (if you are willing to pay the running costs). Would be quite expensive to install, and could impact on any plan to replace the gas boiler with a heat pump if/when the time comes. On the plus side, you wouldn't need a very big unit (perhaps 2-3kW) and you might find a descrete through wall/window type unit.

Scot_39

MY neighbour has an extension tpye then I guess - hence the Q about open or closed to main house.

But is off gas main - so didn't know about the GCH not being extendable "outside".

Not something I've ever really looked into for myself.

QrizB

FreeBear said:

A more modern solution would be an air to air heat pump - Much cheaper to run in the winter, and could also be used for cooling in the summer (if you are willing to pay the running costs). Would be quite expensive to install, ...

Hence my dwarf wall question.

One of those ducted ones might be a good suggestion, if there's part of the conservatory that isn't glass!

JKenH

Last summer we extended our kitchen with what we call a “conservatory”. It’s 5m x 5m (internal) with 600mm high walls on 2 sides and fully glazed across the front with a solid roof. The existing patio doors from the kitchen were removed and effectively the kitchen/conservatory is one big open space heated by the existing single radiator in the kitchen connected to our oil boiler and an existing 2kW A2A wall mounted heat pump. We did consider relocating the A2A heat pump to the conservatory but the cost at £600 seemed high so we thought we would try it for a year and see how things worked out. We have no curtains and last winter no blinds. We use the conservatory all year round but during the winter we draw a curtain across the opening between the two rooms once it gets dark. (The curtain was already there). 

We would find that the temperature overnight in winter typically would be 6*C cooler in the conservatory than the kitchen (say 12*C compared to 18*) but when it got down to -7*C outside the unheated conservatory fell to 9*C. Flinging open the curtains between the rooms would see heat transfer from the kitchen reasonably quickly and by 9am the conservatory was habitable. 

We have now fitted blinds to the side windows but not across the glazed gable and are hoping this will mitigate the heat loss a little (but not much) this coming winter. We are not planning adding any more heating. 

I did a rough calculation in heat loss and over the winter months I worked out it would roughly take about an extra 4kWh per day to heat the conservatory. As we only use the oil fired CH for a couple of hours in the morning to heat the conservatory the heavy lifting is done by the A2A unit. We also benefit from some solar gain even though the conservatory is North facing.  We roughly used around £100 extra electricity last winter (on Octopus Flux) which ties in with the rough calculation for heat loss I did. If we were to use a convector heater it would probably cost us about 4 times as much.

CarolWHerts

Last year we had a warm roof put on our large (40 square metre) north facing conservatory and looked at the heating options at the time.

We went for the electric mat style underfloor heating as we were also replacing the flooring anyway (and I have cold feet) but this was a mistake - it draws huge amounts of electricity and doesn't make much impact on the temperature. It's just about worth a conscious decision to switch it on (hours in advance, as it needs to warm up 'the slab' of cement like material they spread over the mats, and which is supposed to hold the heat) and take the hit when we have something planned that involves sitting still in the conservatory on a very cold day, but it just adds marginally to the comfort level and additional heating is needed too.It might be a different calculation if you have the practical option of a water pipe based system, or if your conservatory is of different construction or is much smaller. 

We didn't have the option of adding a radiator to the existing gas central heating because the conservatory and furniture layout didn't leave enough free wall space. 

What has been a big success however is the heat pump aircon unit that was already in the conservatory before the roof was changed. With the additional insulation this now works brilliantly at heating or cooling the room very quickly and doesn't use massive amounts of power. When the sun is shining it uses a fraction of the surplus from our solar panels. Moreover, the aircon engineer who installed and services it remarked that it was now an overpowerful system for the room, given the improved insulation, so in very hot weather we now open the doors into the rest of the house and it cools most of the ground floor, which has been amazing in the recent heatwave.

We have a couple of mobile electric heaters (one radiant, one oil filled radiator) which we might bring into the conservatory if extra background heat is needed. They work well, and are not too costly to run, but we now use them infrequently.