Diy Conservatory Condensation

Conservatory Condensation control
If you do not plan to include plants to your list of fixtures and furnishings for your conservatory, you’ll will be likely to get condensation, if appreciate that in addition to absorbing carbon they have an ability to process it through photosynthesis and, in doing so, to release oxygen. The carbon cycle is something you don’t notice going on outside, but indoors this process, combined with the moist soil that even pot plants need to flourish, can create a humid environment that without good ventilation will cause damp air and condensation in your conservatory. The glass will drip with it. It’s more likely to occur when the temperature on the outside of the glass is much lower.

Even without plants, a not inconsiderable amount of water will have been used in the construction of the conservatory base and brick walls, and this will need to dry out over a period of time. Your average concrete conservatory base alone has well over a bathful of water in it, so give it a drying-out period before you bring in the soft furnishings: and if you can’t leave the doors open to let in air, you could always hire a dehumidifier to limit the condensation.

Another source of moisture that is often forgotten is trapped in the existing external wall that, now built over, has suddenly found itself to be an internal one. For the next 12 months it will slowly be coming to terms with this fact and gradually dry out. If you were thinking of laying carpet, don’t until you’re absolutely certain that the slab has totally dried out. The prospect of the damp being trapped beneath underlay will lead to what seems like a permanent musty smell and a damp quality you won’t enjoy.

It isn’t uncommon for the addition to be built off the kitchen (kitchens tend to be at the back of the house, exactly where most conservatories are added on) and kitchens have cookers and washing machines and tumble driers and bucketloads of moisture in the air. Cooking three meals a day, washing and drying clothes, plus dishwashing for the average family will produce something like 20 l of water every day, and if you’ve just covered the kitchen window with a conservatory, you can guess where all that water is going to condense.

It is best to ensure that all vents serving appliances are redirected to another external wall, even if that means doing some plumbing alterations or extending vent ducts through the conservatory to its adjacent outside wall.

You can also make sure that your kitchen has a mechanical extractor fan ducted to the outside air. If it’s over a cooker in the form of an extractor hood, this is ideal. Kitchen extractors should have an extract rate of at least 60 l per minute, but many have variable speeds so you can turn them up when you are frying the chips. Do not be tempted to use a charcoal filter type instead, which might remove some of the smell but not the moisture. For a fan to work, it needs to be ducted over a shortish length of pipe and out through a sleeve in the wall. Some fans are described as centrifugal and some as co-axial; the former ones are most efficient.

Worse still is the idea of using a glazed addition to vent your appliances into, or, as some do, to use it as a utility room. All these are bad ideas unless you can ventilate the conservatory both permanently and rapidly. By “permanently” means vents such as trickle vents and air bricks that are always open, as opposed to windows that are mostly shut. And by “rapidly”, extractor ventilation and openable doors, roof and window vents. Even a conservatory can have an electrical extractor fan, which, fitted with a preset humidstat switch, can draw out the damp air. These humidstat models switch on the fan when the relative humidity of the air reaches a preset percentage – this is 65 per cent for bathrooms and kitchens and if you choose a model that is adjustable you can increase this to a slightly higher setting to suit.

Designing in all these factors at the outset will help you to avoid the conversion problem later. If not, you could save yourself time and expense by incorporating the solid roof in your design now.