Was Shop heat---update

WOW,

Gentlemen thank you for some great responses, lots of useful info. I spoke to a contractor today and he suggested a combination of tube deep in the slab and some separately poured spots for the power hammer & shear. nothing else will really need to be anchored deeper then 4"

A couple of follow ups:

Harold-- is the rebar @ 18" centers in addition to mesh or instead of?

JW-- you said you used icf's for the walls is that the full 16'? I'm just starting to look at them, which ones did you use? I'm planning on 12' walls toped with concrete plank for the shop area (lower level) and on top a stick framed garage/studio 9' wall with a gambrel roof. I'm building into a hillside and the building won't be square (40' x 28' x 50' on the long side & whatever across the front-hill, long story involves the wife & her garden.....) on the hill end so I'm interested in how you handle that with icf forms.

Dave--I do have access to a thermal imager but not that I could take home :(

As far as the heat source is concerned I'm thinking about a coal fired boiler(auto stoker) it would easily heat the shop and also offset the house load too, but if that doesn't pan out a large water heater and a couple of solar panels would do the shop nicely. If anybody has shop (construction shots would be real nice) pictures on line post a link. Once I break ground I'm going to put shots on my web page. I'm all ears for shop construction tips.

Thanks again

Andrew V

Reply to
Andrew V
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amed garage/studio 9' wall with a gambrel roof. I'm building into a

If you can arrange some south facing glass etc, it always helps.

If you are going to make money in this space, think seriously about a well designed solar and then an oil fired or nat gas backup. Coal just sounds like tinkering to me. Yeah, maybe cheap, but if you are bored, get a woodstove, at least it smells nice. Wood can be free. Pallets are awesome sources of heat.

That's the ticket, some nice big solar arrays, tell the wife she can plant flowers around them. An oil boiler for the peak hours, and a woodstove for when you ought to be working and feel like burning shit.

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yourname

Reply to
Waynemak

Reply to
Waynemak

I don't know what Harold did, but I laid mesh, then decided that adding ~1000 feet of 1/2 inch rebar was quite inexpensive ($250 or so at the time) and it helped to keep the mesh more like flat. I had fiber mix poured, too. I used up extra bits of mesh by putting a double layer (above and below the rebar) at the doorways. I also have 750 feet of radiant heat tubing in place (near the bottom of the slab), but have not got heat hooked up to it, so I'm not chiming in on how well it works yet, though I expect it to work well. Pay attention to the edge insulation - I have a tiny bit of uninsulated face showing at each door, but all the edges, including the edges at the doors, are insulated. It wasn't too hard to convince myself that insulating under the slab, around the edge of the slab, and also insulating the outside of the stemwall all the way to the footing (which, naturally, has a drain all the way around it) made good sense. Walls are SIPs, place is _well_ insulated all around, or will be when the ceiling is in place and insulated above. You cannot go back and add more insulation or reinforcement after the concrete is poured, so slight overkill, within reason, is better than underestimating. Massive overkill wastes money.

Rebar is easy enough to put in yourself, if you have time/inclination. Pouring & finishing the concrete is better left to an experienced crew, IMHO, having done it both ways.

Take the time to bend corners (so that corner re-inforcement is a nicely radiused bent rebar, tied into the rebar grid with adequate overlap, not just crossing rebars held by tie wires). No reason you can't do that all the way to the middle, but at least 3 grid spacings in from the corner should be tied in that way, IMHO. Corners are stress concentration areas.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

My walls are 8" concrete with the 2.5" of foam on either side. With the 4' footers, the walls are actually 20'. Done in two pours. There is a 2x10 sillplate and standard rafters. It is sided with steel and a steel roof. Interior is done with OSB and drywall.

ICF is very flexible. You can build curved walls, odd angles, etc. It is almost easier than "conventional" construction. Plan everything ahead. While not impossible, it is very difficult to add "holes" later.

My supplier,

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There are many different ones.

I have a bunch of photos somewhere. I will have to repost.

Reply to
cyberzl1

Instead of. However, if I said it was on 18" spacing, I was wrong. The hoses are, but the rebar is on 12" spacing. I have a photo of the layout in one of our albums which I could scan if you're interested. It worked out by choosing where I tied the hoses. I could install rebar as cheaply as mesh at the time, and I don't like wrestling with the mesh that comes from rolls. It's clearly a bitch to get flat enough to keep your hoses where you want them, and dobies don't do much of a job of keeping it at the right height. I decided that if I was going to spend the money, I may as well get the benefit of the stronger support. No regrets, aside from it taking a lot of time to tie the intersections. I poured about 2,600 square feet. I strongly recommend the rebar in lieu of mesh to avoid any settling should you get cracks.

I added a lot more rebar at the entrances, where I risked breaking the edge of the floor with my lift truck. It weights about 5 tons alone, as I stated, and I figured it was cheaper to add rebar than to fix a broken floor and heating system. To that end, I ran additional rebar from the entrance to roughly 6 feet in. That maybe wasn't necessary, but the floor hasn't cracked, in spite of having hauled a maximum load through the doors, so I'm happy I made that decision. I also used a 6 sack mix. In my opinion, saving a couple hundred dollars on a project of that magnitude is not worth the risk from cutting corners.

One other thing I did was install a built in vacuum cleaner, a large one capable of servicing 18,000 square feet. All of the pipe is either under the floor or poured in the walls. Twin motors, with no filter bag. It discharges directly outside and has a cyclonic separator. We'll extend it to the house, so it will serve double duty. If your budget can stand the cost, it's a super way to go for keeping a shop clean. We can walk around in stocking feet with no worries (we're living in the shop while we build).

Good luck!

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

With a tie-wire-wrapping tool (spinner) it's probably less time than fighting with the rolled mesh is - but I had the mesh on hand (bought ahead at a good price and stored), and the overlaid rebar helped to keep it flatter. Were I to do another, I'd give more rebar and no mesh a thought, or look for a source of flat mesh panels, rather than rolled mesh.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

How much insulation did you put under the slab and where? I was talking to a radiant flooring guy last night in Washington who told me that WA now requires 2" under the full slab. And what kind did you use? Seems like standard extruded polystyrene would be fine for a normal garage but I'd like someone to tell me it would be fine for heavy loads like you are using.

Thanks. Steve.

Reply to
SteveF

"Andrew V" wrote in news:4212aa76$1 snipped-for-privacy@alt.athenanews.com:

While you are laying block, go ahead and size the footer, lay up, reinforce and pour some support columns for the evenutal overhead crane/trolley steel you will wish you had built support columns for when you built the shop.

Reply to
Anthony

That's what I used, in 1" sheets with seams staggered.

R-5 styrofoam blue board. Ten years ago, not so many options. I have the fiberglass reinforcement _and_ steel 6" mesh in the floor, so any point loads _should_ be handled long before they get to the foam.

Dave Hinz

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Hi Andrew, I am currently building a house out of ICF's - we are using

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blocks and think they are great. We have a 1900sf basement and 2500sf upstairs - stacked them right up to the top plate (2x12 treated). I wish I had known about them when I built my shop 14 years ago. I can't say anything about radiant floor other than we will be putting it in the house soon with 2" of gypcrete over it. (Wish I'd done it in the shop) I would be happy to answer questions about our project and could provide some pictures if you'd like. Regards, Jim snipped-for-privacy@olypen.com

Reply to
Jim & Hils

I cut corners, a decision I now regret with the cost of heating oil over $2/gallon. At the time I could fill my tank @ 70¢/gallon. I used only 1" of board (R-5), which I purchased directly from a distributor. With 2,600 sq. ft. of floor, the savings (over $1,000) was attractive, but foolish. The board is made by Dow, and is blue in color. Unless one has a terrific floor load, the 25 PSI material with thick reinforced concrete should be more than adequate, considering that works out to a loading of 3,600 lbs/ft. I just wanted the added insurance to guarantee I wouldn't crack the floor with my lift truck. Cork Insulation in Seattle was the source, if that helps.

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

Thanks for the info.

One question comes to mind. One my first (and only garage) I did a 6" concrete floor with fiber reinforcement. No rebar and no mesh. Cut control joints properly. A year later no cracks except the ones in the control joints and everything looks fine.

If I put in radiant piping I must but in either mesh or rebar to hold the piping in place during the pour. From what I've read on the concrete web sites, the rebar shouldn't cross the control joints since that defeats the purpose of the control joint. I guess the radiant piping can stretch a little without a problem.

How did you handle the control joints or did you just leave them out?

Thanks. Steve.

Reply to
SteveF

The guy that did our floor does a lot of commercial concrete work and suggested that he score the floor with a bull float with a skeg, for lack of better definition, then finish over the score. He said any cracking would follow the score, even though it wasn't visible. His rational is that the skeg separates the coarse aggregate, which is expected to lend the greatest strength to the concrete, and replaces it with fines of lower strength, encouraging the floor to crack at specific places. It turned out exactly that way, in spite of the fact that our rebar is continuous. Any cracks that have occurred are at scores, although not every score has cracked. We haven't found any wild cracks, and the floor is now 5 years old. Therefore I'd have to say that the information that suggests rebar defeats the purpose of the score isn't true, at least in our case. To be perfectly honest, there's no way in hell I'd pay the price of hydronic heating and install it without something to prevent the 'crete from moving when it cracks, and crack it will.

Regards the piping-------I know I'll sound like an idiot, but I don't have a lot of faith in the plastic stuff. We used rubber hose, a product made by Goodyear to Heatway's specifications for the purpose of hydronic heating. I figure it will tolerate a little misalignment, but at this point that's a non-issue. I'm sure the plastic would have worked equally as well, and it's one hell of a lot cheaper to buy. We paid roughly 70¢/ft. for the 3/8" rubber hose. While we didn't pay for a trace, they make the same product with a trace so it can be detected easily. I felt no need because it's placed deep enough.

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

One thing I should mention too....

Whoever does your floor. Don't let them put in chloride. They do it so it will set up faster and they can get the hell out of there. The slower concrete cures the stronger it gets. Plus if it cures to quickly, it will shrink faster than it can accomodate and you will get stray cracks where you normally wouldn't.

Reply to
jw

Don't know where you're reading that, but I've never seen that one, and I've been known to read concrete books for fun. In any case, it does not match up with practice, as I've seen it, and built it. My floor is sawcut ~1 inch deep on a roughly 11 foot grid, rebar & mesh is continous. The cuts were filled with caulk before the floor was painted, which keeps crap from collecting in them. The cuts serve to concentrate any cracking stresses into cracking along the cut. The rebar keeps the cracked chunks from shifting WRT each other. If you cut the rebar, the various hunks of floor will most likely offset significantly over time, making it very hard to move stuff around the floor, and also breaking your tubing.

You may be thinking of an expansion joint, which needs to be free to move, but is rarely encountered in home or home-shop scale projects, most of which are not large enough to need them.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

I had a floor poured about seven years ago. It is seven inches thick at the thinnest. It has re-bar, wire mesh, and that fiber that you can have added to concrete. The only cracks I got were after an earthquake that moved machines weighing 1 and 3 tons. And, when I let a 2.5 ton machine down too fast, I got a crack from that. All the cracks are too narrow to get anything in, like dirt or chips. But I was wondering if there was some epoxy or other glue that could be drawn in by capillary action to keep the cracks from getting wider. Or even if it needs to be done. There are other places where I've chipped the floor pretty deep, like when using a crowbar to shift a machine when the slab was too soft. Epoxy is used to fill these and works well. ERS

Reply to
Eric R Snow

I fully subscribe to that! Not only did I not permit chloride, I also draped the three 10' X 10' doorways with a large tarp to exclude sunlight from hitting my floor. I also kept it wet for a few days by spraying with water.

I had one very negative experience with calcium chloride, a basement floor that was poured before the subfloor was installed. It was done on a very warm day in May, in Utah. The clowns that ordered the 'crete wanted to hit it and get out, which they did. Between the chloride and the sun, the 'crete got so hot you couldn't touch it, and by evening there were cracks everywhere, many of them 1/8" wide, some perhaps even more.

Avoid calcium chloride and sunlight as if they're the plague. A long, slow cure is exactly what you need for good concrete.

Harold

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Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

Sorry to tell you this but Goodyear made some very bad hose in the early 1990's, there E2 series. it caused Heatway to go bankrupt, ruined 1,000's of heating systems. I had installed a few of them and they failed. It was a disaster for the industry (and me) . There is now a $ 200+ million class action settlement underway. Heatway was bought by Watts, and now makes a very good all EPDM hose called Onix.

Reply to
Vinny

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