Solarize Your Porch With Vinyl and Canvas Panels

These are some pictures I took of a restaurant on the main street of Moab, Utah.

They use a pretty well thought out set of canvas curtains with sewn in Vinyl window to enclose their outside eating area when its cold or windy.

My thought is that with a few changes this might make a good way to convert your porch into a sunroom with these nice features:

Fairly inexpensive
Very easy to go from completely open to enclosed, and back.

The scheme they use leaves gaps between the canvas and the posts. It would be good to work out a way to seal these better so that there would less air infiltration.

A porch enclosed with these panels would heat up to a very comfortable temperature even on cold days, as long as the sun is shining on the porch. It would very likely heat up enough to provide some heat for the attached house.

A potential solar porch enclosure