Best way (most efficient) way to heat my studio?

Doesn't the basic combustion of hydrocarbons yield CO2 and H2O? I'd sure worry about water vapor in my shop. Is yours insulated?

I use yard sale electric heaters right in my work area when I get cold in my shop in the winter. I see those oil-filled radiator thingys all the time, standard YS price is five bucks.

Cost is a factor for me too, and likely always will be.

Grant Erwin Kirkland, Washington

RainLover: I also need help on this same topic. I don't mean to parachute in on your post, but I just had one of those cooler periods here in St. Louis, followed by a warm humid period and my machines and tools are getting wet and rusting! My shop is smaller 400 sq ft. and is a converted detached garge. I'd like to ask anyone posting on this topic to include smaller shop solutions as well. I am considering a window heat/cool combo unit. Thanks

-Mike

Greetings James, My shop is sort of like a quonset hut too. I use radiant heat. A big tube with a burner at one end. It's 150,000 BTU and will drive you right out of the 30 x 40 shop. It heats objects, not the air, which I like. I want warm tools and cool air. There's a fan in my shop that blows the air down when it gets warm so there is some circulation. And it doesn't blow cold air. The forced air heaters will blow cold air until the whole shop is warm. So if you are at the opposite end of the shop from the heater even though the air out of the heater is warm it will be cool by the time it gets to you. And it will blow right down your neck. If you shop is not insulated and you exhaust a propane heater into the shop, even with proper ventilation, the water from combustion will condense on the building and rain down on you. I know, I've been there. Eric R Snow

RainLover: I also need help on this same topic. I don't mean to parachute in on your post, but I just had one of those cooler periods here in St. Louis, followed by a warm humid period and my machines and tools are getting wet and rusting! My shop is smaller 400 sq ft. and is a converted detached garge. I'd like to ask anyone posting on this topic to include smaller shop solutions as well. I am considering a window heat/cool combo unit. Thanks

-Mike

The direct flame heaters like the classic bullet heaters are only for temporaty use. The chemistry combustion will tell you that for every gallon of fuel you use, you will nearly a gallon of water vapor (exact ratio depends on exactly the hydrocarbon you are burning) My 115k BTU kerosene heater uses a gallon an hour, puts a gallon of water into the air. It's not a big issue for the center of the garage, the tools sitting in the far corner tend to get rusty. Not too mention the issue of Carbon Monoxide poisoning if your burned is misadjusted or malfunctioning. I've had it once, survived the experience, it was NOT fun.

The infra red gas heaters have the same issues, you are pumping water into the area, you are not venting the fumes outside.

Since the building is built, skip the in floor hydronic heat. Nice and even but hard to retrofit.

You are left with forced air or tube infra red. Both are good, the forced air warms the air, makes it nice to work. Infra red warms the equipment, you will still want to wear a vest.

consider getting a used home furnace. tear outs are common as folks upgrade to higher effiency units. I've seen 5 year old units show up on

in the free section. $50 to $100 should get you an

80k btu unit with 80% effiency. Use a standard plennum > hey everyone,

Hey Mike,

Won't "fix" everything, but a couple of those 10 to 20 dollar Wal-Mart ceiling fans (no lights) left running blowing "down" constantly will help decrease the rust formation. Won't do anything to remove rust once it's started, but sure helps to slow it down from starting.

Helps to keep the heat off the "peak" and circulating too James, but run them "up".

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Pellet stove? Ken.

If you use a propane or natural gas heater both will work fine PROVIDED that they are both properly vented to the outside of your shop with some form of a chimney.

The majority of wall mounted gas heaters that I am familiar with provide a connection for an outside vent as part of their design. Be sure that you connect it properly.

Harry C.

I agree with the home tear out route. Watch the curbs for some upright furnace and make sure it is vented properly. An amazing amount of heat is put out by a home de-humidifier, the little small roll around types which you will often find in garage sales for $10.00. It will pull the water out of the air and heat up the area quite well. I've got two shop rooms that are 1500 sqft each 10ft ceilings and one de-humidifier in each room adds about 3-5 degrees in the cold days. Eats up a bit of electric but worth getting the water out of the air.

Pedroman

According to Pedroman :

One consideration is that burning *any* fuel in the shop creates water vapor (burning the hydrogen in the fuel) as well as CO2 (from the carbon part of the fuel).

Since you are starting out from a cold shop, the air will heat up first, and hold more of the water vapor, and the machine tool surfaces will take some time to catch up in temperature, so the water vapor will condense on the metal, thus risking serious rust problems.

An electric heater keeps the air dryer, as does a heat pump. Both will cost more to run -- but are less likely to damage your machine tools.

You say "studio" heat -- so you may or may not have machine tools there to be damaged.

Enjoy, DoN.

How much is your life worth? I mean, aside from the $ .98 cents worth of chemicals you are made up of.

Go down and buy a Kidde CO alarm with a memory and a digital readout. This will tell you the current CO level, and the highest level it has been since the last reset. They are $30.

Doing propane in a confined space is a stupid thing to do, and so stupid that even OSHA frowns on it.

So, whatever you try, whatever you experiment with, do it safely, and get a CO monitor to keep track of it so your loved ones don't find you paws up on the floor one morning, one degree above room temperature.

Steve

Hello!

My workshop ccnsists of half of my two-car garage. After abusing my machine tools for several years by not heating the garage (and here in upstate New York that means a very cold workspace in the winter), I installed a celing-mounted heater, fed with propane from exterior tanks. The heater exhausts through a vent pipe to the outside.

This has proved to be an excellent solution to my heating needs: the machines, and my bodfy, are kept from freezing, and there are no problems with condensation. The heating contractor who installed the heater urged me to insulate the garage, so I installed a framework of

2X6's and put in thick fiberglass insulation bats. My machines (and our car) love the space now.

George

Hi, I heat my basement shop with wood. The woodstove came from Navy City Metals in Gorst ie cheap. Last year I burned a lot of scrap wood from a wood shop. The wood was nice and dry. It did need to be cut shorter to fit the stove and one did have to watch for nails. But the price is right. Now one can only install a certified stove so useable wood stoves are harder to find and more expensive to buy.

I don't think you should use wood as your only source of heat. It is not economical when you consider the time it costs you. But I would sure recommend it over no heat at all and if you generate any wood scrap it will help you get rid of it.

Dan

Ra> Winter's right around the corner and after 2 years without studio

Sending this another time in case it didn't go through... Pellet stove? Pretty much automatic, safe, approved, cheap, clean dry, efficient, etc., etc., etc. Ken.

1. As folks have suggested, a fan or fans as high up as you can get them shall serve admirably. The object is not to blast the air, but merely to bring the air at the top down to floor level to just kiss the floor, so to speak.
2. Any insulation you can apply will yield a rather handsome return on your investment.
3. Propane as a fuel is acceptable. The heater that you use must needs be a vented one. Anything less is inapproriate for the task you describe. If you want infrared, it will work to heat people & objects in front of it as also heat the air like a blue flame heater. One is not more efficient than the other; the former has 2 ways of heating while the latter has 1 way of heating. They shall both emit the same amount of Btu, if you compare any 2 that are rated at the same heat output.
4. Unfortunately heating is no longer cheap. You may find ways to reduce cost, (buying used equipment as opposed to new), but you should now mentally accept that heating is an expensive part of living, depending on where you are on the planet. Hope this helps. Ashoke - heating.products.bz/lptype.html

I do the same thing. My shop came with a woodstove built from a

55-gallon drum. I separate shop trash into burnable and not. So I get rid of paper towels, newspaper etc that is soaked with oil or anything else. Same with wood scaps, cardboard, old crossties removed from landscapng etc. If I keep it hot no noticable odor comes fro the stack. Here in N Texas I rarely have to supplement the scrap and discards with real firewood. But there's plenty of that that I won't burn in my fireplace at home. My intention is to convert it to waste oil by adding a compressed air line blowing across a tee-fitting to spray the oil into the drum. I'll start it by burning the usual waste, then cut in the oil as it burns down.

BIG SNIP

Hey Rex,

The compressed air is not necessary. If you "dribble" the used oil in at the top of the fire box, a drop or so per 1 to 5 seconds, and provide a splash/catch pot near the bottom of the fire chamber, that will suffice. As the drops fall through the flame, they "pre-heat" and when they hit the splash/catch pan, the striking/splashing on the hot can vapourizes them and the oil burns quite nicely, almost as a gas. It does require a pre-existing fire to get started though, to heat the can and rod. An old "space heater" is perfect.

In the "old days" we would hang a coffee tin (1 or 2 pound tin??) on an 8" long 1/4" steel rod poked though the tin from side to side just below the open end, and hung across the space heaters existing fire ring The drops would actually hit the red-hot rod, and create such a heat as to make the whole stove "dance" from the combustion reactions, and get very hot if you let too much oil flow. At an un-educated guess, I would think that this created a BTU output factor of roughly 4 times what the highest setting using just the proper stove oil (like a kerosene), and the stove flow valve.

These proper space heaters had a fire-box access door for lighting them with a match to ignite the stove oil, so ready-made access to do what we did.

Try something like this first, before you get all elaborate. Admittedly, you won't want this to be left un-attended for any length of time.

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Heat pumps generally work pretty well in the Pacific northwest--a 3-1/2 ton unit should probly do okay for a building that size, so long as it's insulated fairly well.

You would want to have 10 ~ 15 kw of backup heat strips installed in it for in the rare case our outside temps drop into the low 30's or lower.....that or else oversize the unit towards additional heating capacity....just realize that an oversized unit won't de-humidify as well during our ( relatively short ) summer cooling season.

Brian I appreciate the input. I recall the old stoves when I was a kid visiting some backwoods shop with a drip WOH.

I've been thinking about this a while. The reasons I'm leaning toward compressed air:

1 - From what I've read, it's makes the hottest flame, the quickest. I'm more insterested in complete combustion than BTU output, but quick heat is desirable. I typically get to the shop at about 6:30 and work till 10:00, so the quicker I get heat, the more I can get done. I don't want any black smoke coming out of the stack to bother my neighbors, who are pretty closeby. This shop is situated in a mobile home community. 2 - Drip feed means I'd probably want the waste oil source at a higher level than the stove. That would make it inconvenient to pour into. With compressed air the venturi vacuum would siphon out of a floor-level drum. 3 - The drop distance I'd have would be whatever I could get out of a 55-gallon drum on it's side, less the height of the catch-pan, so the oil would only drop about 14". Would that be enough? 4 - With the oil feed enter> >