Choosing Between a Three-Season Porch or an All-Season Sunroom

In it’s simplest, a three-season room or sunroom is a porch modified to keep the weather out. A three-season room protects you from the wind, rain, and snow, but it isn’t heated or cooled. A sunroom not only keeps the elements out, it offers a heated and cooled environment like any other room in your house. If you’re looking for a protected spot to get some fresh air and don’t mind what temperature that air is, consider a three-season room. If you’re a sun lover who’d rather not brave freezing cold or oppresive heat to bask in the sunlight, think about a sunroom.

Room Options

You can convert an existing porch or three-season room by installing glass and screen panels and a storm door between posts or columns. Or you can build a new three-season addition with floor-to-ceiling window-and-screen panels.

Because it is uninsulated and unheated, a three-season room won’t get much winter use in cold climates. But on those late fall or early spring days when a porch would be uncomfortably chilly, a three-season room can warm up nicely as radiant heat from the sun is captures in the enclosed space. In some cases the off season may be the summer, when the uninsulated, unairconditioned space may get too toasty.

Sunrooms are by definition habitable in all seasons, though the demands of insulation, heating, and coolingn make them more expensive than three-season rooms. They may be conversions of porches, patios, or decks. They can be be custom-made form the ground up or they can be manufactured and installed in a matter of days.

Many sunrooms are highly finished and indistinguishable in style, detail, and furnishings from other rooms in your house. Or they may have a distinctive style all their own.

Whether they are conversions, custom built, or factory made, three-season porches and sunrooms have many similarities. Their basic structures are often the same. Replace single-pane glass with insulated glass and add insulation to the walls, floor, and roof, and add a source of heating and cooling. Your three-season room is now a sunroom.