hey Daox, have you thought about maybe putting in a layer of decorative brick wall as a heat sink? If you hunt around in the free ads you can sometimes find reclaimed bricks for dirt cheap or even free if you remove them yourself.

as for the tree in your solar path, hack it down and plant a few more else wheres if you're concience is bothering you ;)

That is really not a bad idea at all cdig. I'll definitely have to think about it.

However, the big tree will need to stay. It blocks a ton of direct sunlight in the summer months and really helps keep the house cool. During winter, the sunroom does get a lot of direct light since the trees have no leaves on them.

Hi,
Nice sunroom!

One thought would be to distribute excess heat from the sunroom to the rest of the house. This keeps the sunroom itself from overheating, and provides some heat for the rest of the house.

If there is an accessible attic, maybe a vent in the sunroom ceiling ducted to a ceiling vent somewhere else in the house, with an inline Fantech type fan, and controlled by one of those replacement thermostats for attic vent fans (HD carries these).

Low mass sunrooms can be good home heaters:
PolySpace

Gary

I second the brick-as-thermal-mass idea. It's a great way to add cheap/free thermal mass.

If you live in an area with alot of rock in the ground, DIG THOSE BABIES UP! Dig yourself a hole in the backyard, sift the rock from it, and stack them up against the wall (if you like stacked stone look). The hole in your yard that will be left over could also be utilized for other things, like a summer fish pond or a compost ditch.

You can do some nice designs with brick/cement/cinder block/stacked stone that look great and make excellent thermal mass. If you can make reflective frames to put around the windows, they'll pick up more sunlight as well. (Like the open flaps of a solar oven.)

Here's an idea I have had, and it actually ties in with a project Daox is working on/has mostly completed...
Temperature dependent door/shade opening and closing. If it's warmer between the glass and shade, the shade opens (in the winter), then when the room gets warm enough the doors open, automatically! Opposite for when the room starts to cool down. You can get a summer setting and a winter setting. You would also want it easy to temporally disable in case you wanted the doors open late at night for some reason. You may even be able to do all of this with one controller. I don't know much about the programming, but your Arduino actuated grill block would be perfect if you could figure it out.

Well, we got some area rugs for the sunroom. These should hopefully help increase solar gains somewhat.

The first one is a smaller rug. In the picture its hard to tell, but its a real dark brown color. Annie seems to like it.

http://ecorenovator.org/pictures/house312.JPG




The second one is much bigger, and multi colored. Again, browns and greens though.

http://ecorenovator.org/pictures/house313.JPG

Have you considered either a darker colored floor, or a floor with some thermal mass to it? Like wood or stone... Or even stove brick, might look pretty neat on the floor. What about a cobble stone floor? (Bricks) I'm thinking about a cobblestone floor for the area closest to the windows in my house, since there are only windows on the south face of it.

The floor actually is pretty hefty on the thermal mass side already. It is ceramic tile over the hydronic pex line with a sand trough sleeper underneath it.

Woops! The white-ish tile looks like Linoleum... I'm still thinking about doing a partial cobblestone floor in my house, though. It just seems to me like it would look neat.. and besides, if I don't like it, I'll just pull it back up, use the brick for something else, and do another type of floor, like wood scraps or something.

That sounds like it would be pretty cool to me. Lots of work though.