Warming of loggias and balconies has become very popular in our country. This is due to the fact that many people desire to increase the area of an apartment by any means, adding to it small but quite functional premises.
You should understand that since the loggia and the balcony were originally designed as cold rooms, their ceilings and walls do not create any barrier to the cold. And if you decide to equip their insulation, the couples coming out of the dwelling should never get under the insulation to avoid condensation. Otherwise, it can lead to freezing of walls, the formation of ice, the growth of mold on the neighbor's wall, which will eventually deprive your apartment of a comfortable atmosphere. It is necessary to ensure the tightness of insulation by using vapor-insulating materials for this.
Insulation order
The process of warming a loggia or balcony should always begin with the preparation of the parapet. It is allowed to insulate only parapets made of concrete or foam concrete. Metal parapets can not be insulated. The parapet should be fitted with a warm glazing, the best option being the PVC windows.
Having installed the glazing, it is necessary to seal up the places, which can cause the appearance of drafts so that the wind does not walk under the heater afterwards. Identified cracks can be sealed with a foam insulation. Then the entire surface of the walls should be checked for leaks and mold and seal all places where water seeps in, and the mold must be thoroughly cleaned.
The same process of insulation must be done in a circle: floor, walls, ceiling. Please note that the wall adjacent to the apartment should not be insulated.
The optimal material for thermal insulation is expanded polystyrene, which can be duplicated with foamed polyethylene foam for steam insulation. Both of these materials come in different thicknesses. The regularity is quite obvious: the thicker the material, the higher the level of thermal insulation provided by it. To determine the optimal thickness, special engineering calculations are used which are far from being within everyone's strength, therefore the home craftsmen try to follow such rules:
- if the balcony or balcony is not combined with the room, then the polystyrene thickness should be 3 cm or more, and the porosity 0.3 cm;
- if they are combined with the room, then the thickness of polystyrene should be 5 cm or more, and the vapor barrier 0.5 cm.
These rules can be used in the event that the heating in your apartment is in order, if the windows are installed perfectly correctly, if inbalcony or on the balcony there is a source of heat and if you live in the middle Russian latitudes.
The size of polystyrene sheets is 60 × 120 cm. Their edges are formed in the form of steps, which should be combined during the fastening, which makes it possible to obtain a so-called warm seam. Where this is not possible, the sheets are attached butt-end, and the seam between them is filled with a mounting foam, which is also used to fill the visible joints between the wall and polystyrene. Fastening of sheets of polystyrene is made by means of dowels. Then all the seams are covered with a usual tape.
For the protection of polystyrene from wet fumes emanating from the room, a vapor barrier layer is applied on it, which is foil-foamed polyethylene. To do this, cut pieces of foil polyethylene of the correct size, on the reverse side of which in some places are glued strips of double-sided scotch. The material is pasted onto polystyrene without mutual overlap. All seams should be pasted with foil tape.
After the insulation is finished, the loggia or balcony must be finished, as we described in detail in this article.
