sunroom ideas: cooling your home

Sunrooms don’t seem to combine with home cooling, and can be a cause of excessive heat in houses to which they are attached... But, strangely or not, sunrooms can be designed to perform summer cooling.

Properly designed, they can perform like a thermal (solar) chimney, providing… summer cooling through a system of ventilation in which they have a key role as a suction system.

Pre-conditions

Your site and climate should have good breezes or... a favorable shading and landscape, able to provide lower temperatures in one side of the home (opposite to the sunroom).

Sunrooms and cooling

The basic idea is that of thermal (solar) chimneys and is rather simple: as the heated air in the sunroom escapes out its top vents (hot air rises...), it pulls the inside living space air into the sunroom, which by its turn draws cooler air from the outside (coming through windows or vents elsewhere in the shaded walls or landscape of the building) into the living space. Solar Chimney

See image, from Australia Sustainability Victoria, for thermal chimneys. An attached sunroom can replace the chimney...

Elements of a cooling sunroom system

The cooling sunroom system demands 1) cooler air in one side of the house, 2) a ventilation system and 3) a sunroom properly located. More exactly, it demands:

- an attached sunroom, located at the sunny wall of the house (usually south, in northern hemisphere; north, in southern hemisphere countries).

- a part of the house exposed to cooling breezes, or sufficiently well shaded and benefiting from cooler air (in many cases this air comes from shaded walls or from a shaded landscape close to the home, or from breezes, and is captured through windows).

- an open internal architecture to allow and promote air circulation and ventilation in the living space.

- a set of vents (upper top vents in the sunroom, low vents in the home’s wall attached to the sunroom…) and windows at the windward side.

Vents and windows

The sunroom should be vented at the top. The system also demands lower vents to the living space of the house, open along with windows on the cooler side of the home. Only so the air is drawn through the living space and exhausted through the sunroom top vents.

Attached sunroom

The sunroom should be attached to a sun-facing part of the house, to get higher heat gains. The wall separating the house and the sunroom should be insulated and must be shaded, to avoid heat infiltration into the living space.

The sunroom should include a set of well located upper vents. These vents will expel the sunroom’s super-heated air, which will suck the exhausted living room air into the sunroom (the living room air is sucked through lower vents linking the sunroom and the building, before being expelled through the top vents of the sunroom).

Open architecture

A cooling sunroom system requires a open or relatively open home layout. The air coming from the windows on the cooler side of the building needs to circulate, to expel the hotter inside air through the lower vents (in the opposite side of the home, to which the sunroom is attached).

Opened and closed vents and windows

The efficiency of a sunroom as a cooling system depends on the existence of sufficiently cooled air in one side of the home and on a well designed system of vents and air circulation.

Any upper vents in the wall linking the sunroom to the living space should be closed during the cooling periods (like any side operable windows and any sunroom windows)...