Conservatories are a hugely popular way of extending your home, but with our summers getting warmer you may have concerns about keeping your conservatory extension comfortable when temperatures soar. For some, the biggest worry is the full glass roof, the key defining design element that makes a glass room a conservatory. Will a full glass roof make your conservatory too hot to enjoy?
No, a glass roof will not make your conservatory hotter if you choose the right glass, with temperature control and UV reduction technology.
Over the years conservatory companies have offered a variety of roofing solutions to help keep your conservatory cool, but most of them compromise the design and look of the glass room. Here are the most common options:
Polycarbonate roofing
In a bid to reduce costs and heat in their conservatory design, some companies choose to offer polycarbonate roofing. Polycarbonate roofing is a budget option, and you get what you pay for in terms of effectiveness, quality, and style. It is made up of sheets of plastic with air gaps in between and is often combined with reflective insulation to reflect the sun’s rays away from the roof. This type of roofing can be transparent, but due to its double sheet construction the view is distorted and so it isn’t visually see-through. Sometimes the sheeting is offered in a range of colour tints such as blue, brown and an almost opaque white. Overall, it doesn’t do much to reduce the heat, it blocks the light making the room darker and isn’t as aesthetically pleasing, this sort of material is much more suited for use on an open veranda or carport construction than your conservatory extension.
Tiled/ solid roof
Some people are opting to have a solid roof with tiles as part of their design, but technically this is a garden room. The solid roof will of course help to reduce heat due to the huge reduction in glass and the shade that the roof provides. Often a small skylight is included to let a more light in. While the tiled solid roof looks great, it is taking your glass room away from being a true conservatory and breaks the wonderful connection with the outdoors that a glass roof provides.
Temperature Control Glass
Over the last decade, glass technology and glazing have moved on to help tackle the issue of overheating in conservatories. While there are lots of options on the market, not all glass is created equal even among those claiming to offer superior temperature control glass. While getting the right glass will be a larger investment, it will be worth it to get the design aesthetic you like while ensuring that your conservatory is usable all year round. The right glass will reflect over 75% of the sun’s rays and will also have a very low U-value, the measurement of the rate of heat loss through a material. These features combined will help to reduce the heat penetrating through the glass as well as the amount of heat lost from inside during the winter months. It’s also important to choose a glass that blocks harmful UV rays to keep you and your family safe and reduce the fading of furniture over time.
New Generation Glass exclusive to Room Outside
Exclusive to Room Outside, our revolutionary and far superior ‘New Generation Glass’ utilises state of the art technology to control the temperature of your glass room and is designed specifically for the British climate. We were the very first company to exclusively introduce the revolutionary solar controlled Wonderglass™ into the UK market from Four Seasons Sunrooms in the USA in 1999. This has now been developed further and we believe that our New Generation Glass leads the field today. NGG offers unsurpassed solar control alongside outstanding thermal performance, making this the best product in its class.
Our NGG roof units will reflect up to 86% of the sun’s rays, meaning that the sun’s heat is reflected or absorbed by the glass, reducing heat build-up in the summer months. No other conservatory roof glass on the market can compete with this level of performance. Using warm edge technology that vastly improves insulation, combined with an exceptionally low U-Value, the U-Value is under 1.0 depending on the option selected by our designers (measured in Watts per m2 per kelvin. The lower the U value, the warmer in winter the room will be). The glass has a specially developed Low-E coating, and the double-glazed units are filled with Argon gas to further enhance the efficiency of the glass ensuring your room stays warmer in the winter. Our roof glass blocks virtually all harmful UV rays to help reduce not just the risk to you and your family, but also by helping to prevent damage to soft furnishings.
