How to Keep Your Garden Office Warm

Garden workshops or offices are quickly becoming common ways to expand your living space, without all of the costs and planning involved in extending your house. However, because garden office pods are separated from your house, there is no way to take advantage of central heating. So how do you keep your garden office warm without breaking the bank?

How to Keep Your Garden Office Warm

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Don’t Skimp on the Planning

If you can spend some time carefully planning your garden studios construction and placement, you can cut down on the lifetime cost dramatically.

First, consider the orientation of your office and do a bit of reading on how green and passive homes keep warm. As it turns out, if you can position your office so that as many of the windows as possible are south facing, you can potentially cut down the heating cost by up to 85%, while at the same time keeping your office cooler in the summer. During the summer the sun is higher in the sky, so combined with a small overhang, south-facing windows will be in the shade instead of direct sunlight, while in the winter, the sun is lower in the sky and will shine into your office, covering a lot of the heating costs.

Orientation alone won’t do much if you cheap out on construction too much, so be sure to view a wide range of garden studios before beginning construction. It is important to make sure that the windows are double glazed, and you should stay away from the bottom end construction materials. Proper insulation or even relatively inexpensive structurally insulated panels may cost you slightly more than an uninsulated wall to build, but will pay for themselves in almost no time at all, and make your garden studio a far more pleasant place to be.

What About Winter?

Realistically, you are going to want an active heating solution during the coldest months of the year, and what you choose will depend on your budget as well as the look and feel you want for your garden studio.

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At the low end, an electric heater will easily provide warmth to a well-insulated space, but certainly won’t add the rustic charm of a wood burning stove. At the most luxurious end, underfloor heating is a fantastic option, but is quite expensive.