Keep Your Sunroom Comfortable All Year Long
If there is one thing that you can count on Arizona delivering plenty of, it’s bright and beautiful sunshine nearly every day of the year. With all that sunlight, it should be no surprise that so many Phoenix-area residents add sunrooms to their homes to take in all that sunshine.
Sunrooms, sometimes called four-season rooms or solariums, are designed to let all that light in without having to bake outside in the heat. Many sunrooms have been converted to multi-use spaces and can include indoor spas, aviaries, green rooms, libraries, and bright, open eating areas where you can sip some lemonade in a cool room during spring and summer barbecues.
Access to sunlight is directly linked to human health and wellbeing. We get 90 to 95% of our necessary Vitamin D from sunlight, and that’s very important. Vitamin D helps keep bones healthy, aids in calcium absorption, and prevents diseases like osteoporosis from occurring. Sunlight also boosts mood and reduces your risk of developing diseases like heart disease and even diabetes.
One of the benefits of adding a sunroom to your home is that you never have to worry about heading outdoors to soak up the sunshine. Sunrooms are created to be comfortable all year long, but that level of indoor comfort with outdoor sunshine requires some proper planning to ensure that the room can be kept at adequate temperatures.
Many homeowners choose to extend their home’s existing heating and cooling systems into a sunroom addition for temperature control. Extending your existing HVAC system into a sunroom requires adding additional ductwork. Of course, this would need to be done by a professional to ensure proper installation.
The primary drawback to this type of installation occurs when your home is using a single thermostat to control the temperatures in every room of the house. A sunroom will do what it is designed to do – deliver lots of light, and that means delivering lots of heat too. The temperatures that a sunroom can reach may be too high for single-zone thermostats, causing them to run continuously throughout the day, resulting in a serious spike in your electric bill.
The aforementioned problem can be solved by adding a zone control thermostat to your home at the same time you install new ductwork. A zone control system allows for a single thermostat to control multiple environments separately so that no one floor or room is heated or cooled unnecessarily.
Another sunroom heating and cooling option that is very popular are mini ductless split systems. Designed to give direct temperature control to individual rooms and spaces, mini ductless split systems work independently off of a primary unit and are an on-the-spot adjustable solution to providing your sunroom with adequate heat and air conditioning only when you choose to turn it on.
There are other options to heat and cool sunrooms, but they are not ideal. Opting for an in-wall, window-style air conditioning unit can help keep you cool in the summertime, but it will have to work hard to cool the room down well enough in the summer heat of Phoenix. These types of units also do not provide heat in the wintertime, making a portable space heater an option for some. Space heaters, though effective, can be very dangerous and should not be left unattended at any time.
If you are interested in exploring your heating and cooling options for a sunroom or other home addition, call the professionals at Sharp Air Conditioning and Heating for a consultation.
We also fix the air conditioning and heating systems. Also, have a look at our other services.
- Gilbert AZ Air Conditioner Repair
- AC Repair Mesa
- Chandler Air Conditioning Repair
- Air Conditioning Mesa AZ
