Heating a 4 season room off the kitchen

4 years ago

We have a room that is off of our kitchen. There is a door to the room which we keep closed all of the time. The room also has a door to our deck. This room has nothing underneath it (picture attached) and it extends out from our house. The area underneath is not enclosed. There are heat ducts going into the room but even with the heat vents open the room is still 40 degrees or cooler in the winter. There is insulation under the subfloor (we had that checked). So right now we just cannot use the room in the winter. In the summer on hot days the room gets very hot. It’s usable but not very comfortable. There are 3 windows in the room. The room is 12x17 so not very big, about 200sq ft.

We want to turn this room into an exercise room/office, install LVT flooring and make it usable all year round. We’ve decided we can try to enclose the area below to at least keep wind flow from cooling it down in the winter (we live on a lake and the wind coming off of it in the winter can be quite chilly). But we still feel another heat source will be needed.

What would be the best way to heat this room? We’ve been exploring many options so far:

Install in-floor heating (which would require us to hire somebody to install) since we are tearing out the carpet to put in LVT anyway
Install a mini-split heat/AC wall unit, but this would be at least $5000 to install so seems like overkill for this room.
Get a portable infrared heater but after some research it seems maybe that would only heat the area right in front of the heater?
Get an electric fireplace (wall mounted or freestanding)

Any advice would be appreciated. We’d like to get this room usable for this winter.

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Comments (4)

mike_home
4 years ago
“There are heat ducts going into the room but even with the heat vents open the room is still 40 degrees or cooler in the winter.”

If this is true then the insulation and windows are not very good. You may need to invest money for an upgrade.

The mini split will provide heating and cooling. It is the most expensive but it can provide year round comfort.
PRO
Charles Ross Homes
4 years ago
The challenge heating and cooling a room like yours from a single-zone system is that the room heats up faster in summer and cools down faster in winter than the main portion of the home. This is due to the level and type of insulation, the exposure on three sides, the windows/doors and the level of insulation in the attic or roof above. If the thermostat controlling heating and cooling of the room is in another area it simply won't ever be comfortable. That's what zone controls are for.

You may be able to zone your existing HVAC system to provide independent temperature control of the room, but the effectiveness of that approach will depend on the type of system and how the heating and cooling loads compare with the heating and cooling loads of the remainder of the system. A ductless mini-spilt heat pump is likely to be the less expensive alternative, can provide both heating and cooling for the room, and superior control compared with a zoned forced air system.
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mn_beachgal
Original Author
4 years ago
We already have a zone heating system with 3 zones - the one that heats this room also heats the kitchen, mudroom and small laundry room. Honestly that zone doesn't turn on much as Zone 2 controls our living room, sitting room which is open to the kitchen/dining area. So turning that Zone up tends to heat the entire upstairs (minus this 'porch' as we keep the vents closed in there since heating wasn't helping much).

We did have 2 HVAC companies come look at it. We were told it has correct insulation in the floors. In the walls we were told that there would have had to have been a minimum insulation required when the house was built in 2000 in order for this to be listed as a '4 season room' so were told adding more insulation would likely not help our issue. We had the whole house remodeled last year (minus this one room) so we know there is insulation above in the 'attic' area). The last HVAC person suggested enclosing the lower area and adding in floor heating as he said he's seen many of these types of rooms before and they are just too hard to heat with the house HVAC system as you said.
PRO
Charles Ross Homes
4 years ago
I had a similar (Sun Room) room in my previous home, although it was on a crawl space. We were able to put it on it's own zone of a forced-air system (it included the Laundry Room and Powder Room on the same zone to get to a reasonable heating and cooling load compared with the remainder of the 1st floor.) The thermostat was located in the Sun Room and it was comfortable year 'round. When I think about the ability to use 200 SF of living area adjacent to the Kitchen year 'round, a $5K investment in a heating and cooling system seems pretty reasonable.