While it may seem like simply spending a little extra mayirt to build a garden room that looks great in the summer brochure may be your best bet, if your main concern is what you can do to keep things warm going into the winter months, it’s a better idea to invest in a garden room that was specifically designed to do so. Moving forward, a garden room that was designed without the appropriate winter heating aspects may be great in the summer and appealing to look, but in the winter it may be a room you only use for half of the year before coverting it into storage for your bikes.
The first thing to consider with a garden room is what building materials were used to construct it. if the frames are made of thermally broken aluminum and have double or triple glazed windows, they’re going to be able to keep a lot more warmth in when compared to a budget made single glazed unit. Heating a garden room that is losing heat at the same or greater rate through its frame is ultimately a waste of time and money.
Infrared heating is typically recommended because it has some advantages over other options, most of which center around what it actually heats instead of what it doesn’t. THe most noticeable reason people tend to like this option is that it heats the people as well as the surfaces in the room instead of heating the air in the room first. Most people, when going this route, go with either a ceiling mounted or floor standing heater. Floor standing heater may be a preference because they require less ceiling space, however you may want to consider ceiling mounted heater option if you have a small room.
If you’re building from the ground up, undermounted heating is worth some consideration as it heats the entire room evenly, but consider that it is, of course, more optimal to include this during framing, so it can’t be added after the floor is in.
3- between infrared and a portable electric heater, running costs will vary depending on the level of insulation on the floor.
Of the three options, a portable electric heater is the cheapest in terms of cost of entry, but is the easiest to get wrong. A basic fan heater in a poorly insulated garden room will run continuously and lose the struggle against an evening’s chill, costing more over the winter than a smaller investment in infrared would have been. In comparison, thermostatically controlled ceramic heaters are better and well worth the price if portable heaters are the only feasible option.
Central heating extension is the least talked about option, as it is the most disruptive, but for a room used regularly, such as a garden office as opposed to an infrequently used hobby room, running pipe from the house is the cheaper option in the long term over any electric option, even with the initial cost of digging the trenches.
Ventilation is something often overlooked when considering a fully sealed and heated room. With roof vents, either manual or automatic, condensation will form on the glass and cause damp, while a poorly heated and ventilated garden room will have damp, compared to one that is adequately heated and ventilated.
Our opinion: Infrared for those retrofitting or using the space intermittently, underfloor for new builds and frequent use, and remember that a portable heater is not the cheapest option over the long-term running cost of an underfloor system in an poorly insulated room.
