Temporary insulation over plastic veranda roof?

[David]

We have a decking area with a loping plastic roof on timber bearers.

Internal measurements for each panel are roughly 2.3 meters * 1.02 meters. I'm interested in the 5 main panels.

Most of the year they are a boon, but in the very hottest weather they make the decking area extremely hot.

I would like to install some temporary shading, and I am trying to work out the best strategy.

I could start with 12 meters of some material by roughly 1 meter wide and mount temporary panels inside the roof area. Or I could cover the top with sheets of material (which in theory is better as it doesn't create a hot spot under the roof).

The question is, what material?

I looked at rolls of reflective insulation but they look expensive - over £100 per roll.

I could buy a couple of cheap ground sheets/tarpaulins and lay them over the top, and I think that they would cope with the heat.

It is just a pain having to get out on the roof to fix them and then remove them. Looking at the above link, I could get a 3 metre * 5 metre which would more or less do the lot!

Above the plastic for ease of design. Below the plastic for easy fitting. I suppose I could run some cord and fit the tarpaulin under the rafters.

Decisions, decisions.

Any experience welcome.

Cheers

Dave R

[Andrew]

Wholesale nursery immediately to the north of where I live has rows of polytunnels for growing shrubs, trees and plants in containers. They drape some sort of ?fibreglass mesh that has reflective stripes built into it. The stripe are about an inch wide with an inch gap between the stripes.

They just unroll about 30 metres of this stuff, which is about

5 metres+ wide and drag it up over the south flank of the tunnel on top of the existing plastic cover and hold it in place with concrete blocks.

In the old days, people would paint the roof of their greenhouse with a weak mix of ?whitewash for the hot summer and the autumn rains would just wash it away.

[Chris Hogg]

+1. What I was going to suggest.

[Theo]

If this is just shading, rather than blocking all the light (I assume the decking area is not airtight), have you thought about awnings? Somewhat depends on how free the area is of obstructions. ebay has some relatively cheap ones.

If you want reflective things, you can get silver reflective mylar in rolls from 'hydroponics' suppliers (see ebay) - it's used for, err, 'indoor horticulture' purposes, eg:

but I'm not convinced they need to be reflective: even something slightly opaque will block a lot of the solar radiation.

If you have the structure to mount them on, some indoor blinds (eg cheap roller blinds from Ikea) could suffice as shading. If your blinds aren't vertical, one trick is to run the edges in electrical trunking so they don't fall out (rigidity depends on the blind, but usually the bottom edge has a stiffener batten that would run in the track).

I fitted white Ikea 'Hoppvals' cellular blinds to block solar gain - they make a decent difference. 38mm trunking is a good channel for those, although it turned out not to be necessary.

Theo

[Animal]

Assuming you mean shading rather than insulation, the main options are whitewash or various types of cloth, plastic netting, reflective film etc.

[Colin Bignell]

On 07/08/2022 15:18, Andrew wrote: ...

IME, only when assisted by a lot of scrubbing of the glass.

[Brian Gaff]

There was also papronet, but after a couple of years it tended to go brittle and fall to bits. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes and our greenhouse had curved plastic bits which you could not get it to stick on. Brian