Sunroom a year-round delight for Allen couple

 By JOHN LEMING - Reprinted from The Morning Call

The dead of winter may not seem like the ideal time to talk about a sunroom, but for Edgar and Gay Balliet II of Allen Township, their sunroom is like a patch of brilliance in an otherwise gray landscape.

The Balliets' sunroom was built by Allen Township-based Tepes Construction, which is much better-known for new construction than for remodeling, but Tepes Construction owner Louis "Lou" Tepes Jr. and Edgar are friends, and both share an interest in flying.

Tepes said the 730 square-foot sunroom, which is positioned parallel to the main axis of the house and juts out from the existing family room, uses Andersen thermal pane casement windows above a relatively low outer perimeter wall.  Above the lower windows are Andersen Flex-Frame windows, which serve as transom lights.

"There's three Andersen Frenchwood doors.  And then we put four skylights in there," which set off the cedar-framed cathedral ceiling nicely, said Tepes, who won a 1997 Lehigh Valley Builders Association award for best sunroom for the job.

"It's pretty much a room for us. My wife likes to raise tropical plants," said Edgar, a veterinarian who has a private large-animal practice and who also serves as the official vet of the Trexler Lehigh County Game Preserve.

Edgar said the sunroom is heated by under-floor radiant system that keeps it cozy in the winter.  He said he was updating the heating system anyway to get rid of the heat pump that had been installed when the house was built in 1979, and switched to a zoned "hydronic" system that heats the rest of the house and provides hot water as well.

The heating system, installed by Climatec Advanced Heating Technologies of Wilson, "works great.  We have a tile floor. It's like a heat sink," he said, adding that the floor actually is warm underfoot during the winter.

And it's economical, Edgar added.  "We used less than 100 bucks worth of heating oil in the past six weeks," he said, and their electric bill has gone down considerably because the system let them get rid of their electric hot-water heater.

Because the open end of the sunroom faces east, into the woods, the sun streams in through the bare trees during the winter to help brighten and warm the room, but in the summer, the leaves cast a cooling shade over the addition.

Edgar said he opted not to have air conditioning installed in the new addition because the home is in the woods and he and Gay, a Kutztown University professor, enjoy being able to be closer to nature by opening all the windows during the summer.

Climatec Advanced Heating Technologies - P.O. Box 3910, Easton PA 18043

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