Replies

1. 
   UncleDunc | May 26, 2004 12:46am | #1

   How much winter sun do you get at your location? What direction do the windows in these rooms face? What is the square footage of the windows? What is the square footage of the rest of the walls, ceilings, and floors in the sunrooms? Is there any heat absorbing material for the sunshine to fall on?

   My guess is that if the windows are a large enough percentage of the wall space to justify the name sunroom, you will have to go to some kind of movable insulation / insulated shutters to keep these rooms warm. The reason being that the best performing windows you can buy are still very much like a hole in the wall. If you insulate all the non window surface to R-80, you'll still be losing a tremedous amount of heat through the windows, and you won't be getting very much solar heat in the windows, and very little of what you do get will be stored and re-radiated at night.

   If you can set it up so the windows look more like insulated walls at night, maybe you can keep enough heat in to make the rooms usable.

2. 
   kostello | May 26, 2004 12:52am | #2

   hate to say it but it might be easier to knock it down and start again.

   or put 5 sweatshirts on.

3. 
   MartinHolladay | May 27, 2004 05:49pm | #3

   Dear GCrane,

   What got down to 20 degrees last winter -- the inside of your sunroom or the outdoors?  Here in Wheelock, Vermont, it got down to minus 30 F.  Unless you are quite wealthy, you're not going to want to sit in a NE Kingdom sunroom in January -- that is, not unless you're wealthy enough to just blow the old room full of heat and to heck with the cost.  And if you are that wealthy, tear down the thing and put up a nice tight room with triple-glazed windows.  We don't get much sun here between Nov. 1 and Feb. 15;  and what sun we do get is low-angle sun, where the sun just barely gets above the treetops.  Around about May 1st, you'll probably feel it might be okay to drink a cup of tea in that there sunroom.  You can use it until the end of September, probably.  Then it makes a good place to stack firewood or boxes of cans and bottles that need to be taken to the recycling center when the snow melts.

1. 
   GCrane | May 27, 2004 06:22pm | #4

   It was 20 degrees inside the sunroom this winter. Yes, it did get down in the minus 30's outside here in Troy also. No, I'm a long way from being wealthy. Triple glazed windows, huh? Well, I guess the best I can do in that case is install some insulated window quilts and insulate the undersides of the sunrooms. I was hoping someone would have some sort of solution that would be more effective and not cost an arm and a leg.

   One sunroom, 7' by 42' faces the west. The other, 7' by 18' faces the south. Complete wall of nailed on single pane storms on the facing side is the only windows. The previous owner has nailed all the storms, even on the house. Cheap ones at that. I guess he never expected to ever want to wash the windows because with the storms nailed on, the outside of the double hungs can't be accessed. As beautiful as the view is, it would be nice to see it through clean windows. Thanks, all, for your help.

1. 
   RickD | May 27, 2004 09:33pm | #5

   Why not just make it screen porch?  Absent a boatload of money, that's a 3 season room at very best.  I am sure there are more black flies than cows up there, so opening completely is out of the question.  Short of ripping out everything, if there are storms on the outside and double-hung windows inside, you could just take out the double-hungs, use the screens on the storms, and you've got a better view.

4. 
   DanH | May 28, 2004 12:46am | #6

   Just nail plastic over the whole thing. (Or, better, nail it up on the inside.)