A couple of years ago before I bought my shop I asked you guys about shop heat. The consensus back then was a waste oil heater. I went with a large wood furnace and it has worked ok but takes a very long time to heat the shop up, so now I am looking at a way to heat up the shop faster and still use the wood furnace as supplement heat. The used oil heat sounds great but here is the problem I have, I only produce about 40 gallons a year of waste oil and every one that I have spoke to around here that is producing any big amounts of waste oil uses it for heat already. The waste oil furnace that I would buy uses 2 to 3 gallons per hour. MY shop is 30 x 50 and has 20' ceiling height. I have insulated the entire shop; don't need to heat it every day just a few days a week for maintenance. I would do more maintenance if the shop was easier to heat though. My main door is a 14 x 14 overhead to get anything big inside and a 9 x 9 overhead to get a pickup in. When you open that big overhead all the heat escapes. I don't have NG so fuel oil or propane is the logical choices, no coal, corn, pellets etc. We have not had a day above 32 degrees in long time, lately is has been around 0 most every day. Any ideas, what are most of you guys using? Oil or propane? What size would you recommend? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
My buddy has a coal boiler to heat his 40 x 40 x 16 shop. The boiler itself isn't real big and there's a 2' x 2' heat exchanger with a fan mounted from the ceiling. It does a good job, but can take a while to warm a cold shop. He heats his place to 50 degrees all winter. He also has a propane powered infrared tube mounted on the ceiling to supplement the coal. Infrared heats objects, not air. If you bring in a cold truck it only takes about ten minutes to get the shop back up to temperature with the propane on, then you can turn it off.
Thanks Steve, not alot of coal here but I will look into the tube heaters. What do think cost less? Oil or propane? I am leaning towards a propane system because I could put a insta hot, tankless water heater in and I think I can run that off of propane. It would be nice to have hot water too! I have fans hanging from my ceiling that help alot and a fan on the wood burner.
At the moment I think oil is cheaper, but you know how that works. The thing about the propane though is you feel the heat almost immediately and you can shut it down once you warm. I was working on my truck that was parked outside last week there in the single digit weather, I only ran the propane ten minutes before I had to turn it off. The coal boiler took over from there. I don't have any idea what the tubes cost.
I agree that the radiant LP heaters are hard to beat. We are talking about the kind you'd find in a lot of hockey rinks, right? There's a metal fab shop near me that uses a few of these(a HUGE building), and I've never been cold when I go there early in the morning when they first fire the heat up. If they are on and running, you feel the warmth.
Our shop is 40' by 80' with 18' ceilings. The door is 14' high and 20' wide. We heat with oil and keep it heated all the time. If you are only heating a few days, you are using just as much energy because it has to work overtime to bring the shop up to temperature. We keep our shop at 55 degrees all the time and we use about 300-400 gallons of oil per year. If we need a quick boost with heat, we use a torpedo heater. 10 min with that and it is like a sauna.
We have a wast oil burner and radiant propane heaters. We jumped on the oil burner bandwagon and bought one 6 years ago for $11,000. I still don't think it has paid for itself.:Banghead It doesn't require heavy maintanence, but still, you have to clean it regularly, change filters often, and keep the oil supply fairly clean to get the most efficient use out of it. It' a noisy, dirty heat, and the area around is always a nasty pit. It's getting harder to find used oil anymore too. The radiant heaters are so much better.
Yeah,just get a kerosene Reddy heater and a $14 thermostat (also made by Deka). You don't waste any fuel, it heats fast, and its PORTABLE, should ever the need arise.
We installed the radiant heat in our shop a few years ago, after years of 2 large forced air furnaces. Our biggest issue was that when we backed a dozer in the shop the cab was right at the level of the air blower and all the heat was blocked by the cab. Once we installed the radiant tube and our heat has been wonderful ever since. Does get somewhat hot at the back of the shop(first 10 feet or so is the fire and does burn good and hot). But now we can work up front, near the door, and be very commfy(leave it at 52 at night and 56-58 when working in it. Trbo You can see the heat tube at the upper left in the pic. You can see 2 circles above the box on the start of the radiant heat, this is where the 2 forced aire furnces hung, about 3 foot from the celing, backing a machine in there really blocked alot of the air.
we have an old "drip type" waste oil heater, and city natural gas.. we set our city gas thermostat at 40 degrees, and fire up the waste oil heater when we get here to work. once filled/fired up, it'll run approx 12-13 hrs before it runs out of oil. works okay
I use a cannon style propane heater to suppliment, with a 7 gallon tank attached to it. I have a 1500sqft shop, 3 large doors,1 12x12, & 2 10x12. & sucks out all the heat when any of them are opened. I have the biggest problem when I am working on the concrete. I know Sonora isn't as cold as other places, but I do spend a lot of my time kneeling, & low to the concrete. (I do a lot os Stereo, & Remote Start alarms). usually I just crank up the cannon for an hour in the moring, & then let the overheat heaters perculate fo the rest of the day...or till I open one of the doors, then I crank up the cannon again.....just gotta be carefull cause it shoots flame 2-3 feet in front of it. That Instant heat is nice though..untill my pant legs catch of fire, & me shoes melt :beatsme
Do you need all the ceiling height or can you block some of it down with tyvek to hold the heat down?
Orchard, thought about that, but it would be a PITA to do that. The tube heaters do not look like they cost that much, about $1500 would do it. This looks like the answer. I would have to hang them from the ceiling because the mounting height is about 12', How high do you guys have yours?
After talking to a heating company I have some questions. How many BTU would I need and how many feet of a tube heater do I need? How big of a tank should I get and how many gallons of propane do you guys use in a average winter?
Geez!! Your heating company ought to be able to answer those questions, if they can't maybe you should check with some other companies that know more about their product. They have equations at my supply house where they plug in your shop dimensions, door and window openings and insulation value to come up with just the info you're looking for. Check with your propane company on the size tank you need, their delivery schedules will determine that. My buddies tubes are mounted right at ceiling height, as they were at the warehouses I used to do backhauls from. Don't worry, you'll feel the heat at the floor. I think in this case higher would be better as the heat rays will disperse more to give you more even heating. Too close to the floor and you'll have real hot spots. Check with the manufacturer for their specs.
Thanks Steve, sorry for all the questions, but I wanted to have as much info as possible before I had to deal with heating salesman. I called around and they all want to come and sell a whole system so at least I have the ball rolling.
No problem on the questions, I assumed your heating specialist couldn't answer them for you and that surprised me. I really get ticked off when someone doesn't know the business they are in. If you want to build it yourself, I'd google the heaters and find manufacturers, then speak with a factory tech rather than a local salesman.
One nice thing is the floor is an "object" so as our heating guy told us it acts as a storage cell. Get the floor good and warm and it will hold its heat for a long time. This is the way to go for older buildings and for those that might sink bolts or things down into your concrete and risk knocking a hole in floor heat. Trbo
Not to change the subject but someone told me that with floor heat the heat stays close to the floor and doesn't get 100 degrees at the ceiling like forced air heat, any truth to the rumor, he also said with floor heat when you park the shop full of equipment you freeze in the building because the floor is covered, my question is floor heat worth it and does anyone have any experience with it?
We are setting up a new shop right now, we isolated the center bay (which is the largest) and installed a wood furnace, it gets plenty warm in there and we just use wood that is less than good enough for the house.The bay is 22x38x14.
It's true Randy... at least according to a friend of mine. He had a parts store/shop with infrared radiant heat... (not true in-floor heat, with the plumbing that circulates hot water) According to him... there was usually only about a 3 to 7 degree difference between the floor and ceiling... of course, it was a top of the line system... due to the fact that it was a combination store and shop. Don't know about that, Randy... but you could use back up forced air heat, if that was the case.... although, I don't think it would be... with the infrared radiant type.... OCR
we have a floor heated shop. use a corn burning stove to heat the water in a boiler. pretty slick, takes a little maintence to keep the tank full of corn and klinkers out of the burn pan. in general heat is going to rise. no defying physics. But it does seem as though the difference from low to high is less pronounced than other heating systems. mainly because the heat starts at the bottom, not being forced there by say a fan. as far as having it full of machinery, that sounds fishy. your pumping heat into the floor, it is going to move to where it is colder (the air in the shop, or the machine you just brought in) whether that is through the vehicle sitting on it or into the air. even if you stacked the shop full, how much of a vehicle is truly touching the ground?
we dont have a garage to heat, our966,330s are all outside on differant sites
Have you looked into the outside wood fired boilers? I live in Canada and i know quite a few people who have them and love them. They have a large fire box and just smolder all day. You can heat your house and your shop if there on the same property. If you have a furnace in the house you put a heater core and it uses the exsiting duct work. Same idea in the sop except you use a cieling mounted rad. You can burn anything in them and you only have to load 1-2 times a day depending on temp. Its very inexpensive once up and running. Thought you may want to check it out. Lance
heatig thanks lance,for the response. I work for a devolper and one of my duties is to maintain our fleet,luckily we have cat scheduled maintnence every 250hrs,so they deal with it,however i still have to maintain our pegson crusher things like skirt rubber,jaw and cheekplate replacementswhen im not operating. I also maintain our keestrack novum,changing the upper deck as well as lower. my people are decent as to working around cold weather and rain.thanks again
I have a 40x60 pole building w/16' ceiling.I put in radiant floor heat which is hooked upto a Taylor outside water boiler.I keep the floor temp @55*.It keeps everything in the shop dry.I live in western Oregon where we have alot of 40* rainy damp weather in the winter.I also insulated the walls,roof & under the floor.The Taylor will work with wood,coal,propane,used oil.It works well for me,But everything comes with a price.
shop heat I have a wood boiler outside the house and heat a 4000plus sq ft old farmhouse with it and love it but we also have radiator hot water heat and would like to own something, now we just rent this house, and are asking everyone questions about in floor heat, some are happy and others not, a friend of mine put in floor heat in his electrical shop and complained about parking his trailer and pickups in it overnight his temp in his shop was cold enough to see his breath in the morning and has to park his trailer and one pickup outside overnight, he claims the underside of his trailer was 80 degrees but it wouldn't allow the heat to radiate out from under the trailer and his shop was cold until he took it out, his recommendation was to have more floor space and even have a concrete wall 3 ft tall inside the shop and run heat in that instead of the wood and insulation he currently has, two others I've talked to said the same thing, you can't cover the floor with much of anything low to the ground or the buildning cools off, others claim their nuts and not true, any experiences here, we currently run a knipco heater in the shop we are using and only heat it while we are in it, the problem is when we are working under equipment we freeze to death and stand up in the shop and die of heat stroke, people claim in floor heat is the way to solve that.
Everyone I know who has radiant floor heat absolutely loves it, no one has ever complained about parking vehicles and having a cold shop. One I know builds drag racers so there are always project cars parked inside and they are always comfortable. Even if a vehicle did cause a problem, a $15 box fan set on low speed at floor level would cure that in a hurry. The reason radiant floor heat is so comfortable is two fold, heat rises as has been mentioned and you are introducing heat at the lowest level of the building. You also have a radiator that is the full width of the building introducing heat across the square footage, unlike a wall or ceiling mounted radiator which creates hot spots. I've got radiant floor heat of sorts in my home, when my wood burning boiler hits 210 degrees, I have a zone in the basement that runs with the first floor floor joists that the excess heat dumps to. This heats the floor which keeps the house toasty warm, you can definitely tell the difference when the wood boiler is running vs. the oil boiler.
Thanks for the reply, we are asking anyone and everyone their opinions and experiences I figure its cheaper to ask stupid questions than experiment and rebuild mistakes on my own, do you happen to know anything about service pits? We would like to put one in eventually and maybe even heat the floor and walls of that, any thoughts, I asked the installation experts around here and they claim they have never heated walls with hot water but didn't know why it wouldn't work, just hate to be the one experimenting to find out that didn't work very well. Another question, with infloor heat like in a house if you heat it year round, we heat hot water for the house and burn wood year round, will your floor sweat in the summertime? Everyone I talk to turns the wood boilers off during the summer and can't answer my question, even the heating experts did't know, lets say its set at 70 degrees year round when its 90 out will the floor sweat, the reason I'm asking I have a mold alergy and all basements smell musty, if you had infloor heat will it eliminate the problem with mold, because a unheated basement floor usually is less than 70 degrees and sweats causing moisture and eventually mold, will it work in the summer like the winter, dry the floor and eliminate the damp problem??
If you have your heat set at 70 and it's 90 outside, there will be no call for the heat to come on so there will be no effect either way from the heat. If you have a wood burning boiler in the basement burning year round it will tend to keep the basement somewhat drier than if it weren't burning.
Randy, thats a new one by me on a trailer being 80 on the underside and being able to see your breath at walking height. like i said, we have a radiant heated floor in our 100x60 shop. we keep it at 70 throughout the winter. we fill it full of all sorts of vehicles, but it is a shop so that means there is room to get around the stuff. i guess if you just absolutely parked the dang thing chalk full of trailers you could create a pocket of air that acts as a insulator? but that doesnt sound like a handy shop. long story short, we like our radiant heat system. i recommend it to people when they ask about it.
I know you get 91,500 BTU from a gallon of LP.
shop heat thanks for the input, we ask everyone we can about their experiences, we are either going to convert a building on the farm over to a shop or we'd like to build a new house and shop closer to a main highway but can't seem to find a suitable location thats for sale that the county will give us permits to build on, they have been a real pain to deal with and as of yet we've held off spending that kind of money on a building thats not where we live, trying to eliminate the comute just to work on equipment. How thick did you make the floor and how deep are the tubes in the concrete, we have some 30 ton pieces of equipment and we never seem to buy smaller stuff only larger and want to safely drive them in without breaking the cement, farmers are the only ones I've found so far that put in floor heat and six inches seem to be what they went with, thats not heavey enough for me, one heating guy thought maybe put the tubes in almost to the bottom and lay another layer or two of rebar above them for strength and go about 10 inches thick with concrete or 8inches on all bays except one and 12 inches on that one for the bigger stuff? The buddy of mine that had problems put all his trucks and trailers in overnight and packed the shop full and had parts shelves that sat on the floor and just enough room to squeze around the vehicles at night, he ended up leaving the trailers parked out at night and only put his pickups in and raised all his parts shelves up off the ground two feet to help eliminate the problem, his point was make it big enough in the first place to have plenty of floor space he had it crammed so full he had to fold the mirrors in on the vehichles to get them all in, his thought was if you cover or block 80% of the floor space the remaining 20% wouldn't be enough to keep the building nice and warm, he claimed if someone would have told him that he would have made the building 50% bigger, he was used to forced air heat and when you crammed the building full at night everything was warm, several farmers have made the same comment about steel fabrication projects, if you leave large projects covering the floor for several days while construction is being done the shop cooled off to needing a knipco running and when they were done and the stuff wasn't laying on the floor the building warmed back up again, one of them told me he would have made a heated wall four feet tall and set his building on that so no matter what that was exposed was what he would have tried, but their overall opinion was MAKE IT BIG ENOUGH to have plenty of floor space exposed, but most won't admit they spent 100 grand on a shop and it has flaws.
Greetings I am new to this forum ran across it on the web, I am excited that there is a place for like minded people to share their views on heavy equipment, so I thought I would jump in here and share my own experience in this area. Thanks guys!!!! I just purchased a 170,000 btu Reddy heater to warm up a 50'x75' shop does a real good job, the new heaters come with thermostats and they run off of #1 or #2 diesel or kerosene and will run 10.5 hrs on a full tank which is 13 gallons. With off road around 2 bucks a gallon that seems like a pretty good deal no more than you said you were using the shop for maintenance. Paid $400.00 for the heater.
Randy, Our shop sees mainy farm machinery, our foreman would not appreciate me bringing in my rag tag pieces of afterwork hobby (aka heavy equipment) in there. the best i do is sitting outside. Let me check into the details on what thickness the floor is. but i dont know if it will apply to your situation. It was built 8 years ago. Come to think of it, most of the shelving and what have you is off the floor, maybe when the a-maize-ing corn burning stove guy was there they pointed that out. our shop has 3 work stalls that are roughly 15 feet deep and run the length of one side, no way to park machines in a 3 walled area. might be helping alleviate the cooling effect, and our energy is free (treated discard corn) so we keep it warmer than necessary. your pointed in the right direction, we visited a lot of shops before spending more than 100k on a shop. you've got the biggies -build it bigger than necessary -plan for dead space, so stuff is accesible -do the heating right -have an expansion plan -do the lighting right -do ventilation right when i say right, don't do the el cheapo plan. not necessary spend for spending sake, but dont cut corners. and yeah recognize when your done with any project there is always something you wished was different.
shop Thanks for the reply and taking the time to chat, I really appreciate it, seems you ask 1000 questions and when your done you should have asked one more because its still not right. The biggest problem is the EXPERTS on heating and ventilation that should know don't and they are the ones advising us, you know its only money and if its not right just spend until it is, nice if they are receiving but it never works too good from my side of the checkbook. What kind of ventilation did you go with, a positive continuous fan or as needed it would kick on or how?
we did two things. 1st - one of the stalls is a metal room, with welder, chop saw, torch, etc, it has a vented hood roughly 6x6 with a small fan and a vent outside. this has been handy 2nd - we put a 5x5 fan in the eve of the south facing wall, and a vent in the northeast corner. we arent trying to be a foundary or leave stuff running all day and to be honest, the ceiling is high enough we rarely use the large fan. also when you fire stuff up to move in/out, the doors open up and refreshes the air. the large fan is an excess
Thanks for the info every bit helps
i heat 3 homes and a 40 by 60 garage that are about 100 ft. apart. i use a kerosene fired boiler that i have modified to burn just about any flammable oil if one does a good job of filtering. when i started this years ago i listened to too many people "that know". if i had it to do over again i could cut my heating bill by about 25%. my suggestion is keep asking questions. i would pay close attention to someone that says they dont know but is willing to help or try. world is full of people that dont have the guts to say i dont know and throw out any kind of answer that sounds good. best answer this old man got was from someone that was in the business and told me he didnt know. he told something to try. it made the system i had work. yes i would do it again but would make a few changes. now i am too old, lazy or what ever to do the work.
had a 110,000 btu torpedo style kerosene heater burned about 1-2 gls an hour! Got WAY too expensive but it did heat good. took it back for a 65000 and get much better fuel economy and heats good enough