condensation

Insulation, insulation, and insulation.

A Dehumidifier can also be helpful, not least because of the small amunt of background heating it generates, but a waste of energy/money if there's lots of ventilation.

HTH Cheers Tim

Tim Leech Dutton Dry-Dock

Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs

I have a similar garage which had similar problems. A couple of years ago, I bought a cheap de humidifier and I am very pleased with the results.

When I built my garage, I put in a damp course into the single block wall and painted the weather wall with resin on the outside. Dry as toast in there for thirty years.

Insulation - absolutely, but before you rip all the shelving down to get at the walls ;o)), try getting air circulating as the flow under the eaves may well be "panting", the same air being moved to and fro within the building and the core block not moving much at all. A big kitchen extractor fan should set up a one way flow and ought to change the air in the workshop in a few minutes and this monoflow air movement will certainly help.

Usual disclaimers!

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Good point Kim, definitely worth a try. Infact ISTR seeing on the market a fan which included a humidistat and small heater for that very purpose.

As I see it, the biggest problem is sudden temperature changes, particularly when they mean that warm humid air comes into contact with cold machinery. The best way round this is to keep air & machines at a steady temperature, by insulating the building if you can. If you can't, then keeping the building warm will certainly help, but likely to be more expensive in the longer term Reducing the humidity in the building will also help, but a dehumidifier only really works if the building is fairly well sealed. I'm not sure how forced ventilation will help, unless the humidity within the building tends to be high (damp floors?), or the ventilation is enough to help even out temperature changes of both air and iron.

My workshop used to be terribly damp (15" solid engineering brick walls, but corrugated glass fibre roof), and no way I could keep condensation off machinery at this time of year. Some years ago (thanks to building society demutualising!) I rebuilt it with a proper well insulated flat roof and insulated dry wall linings. Now I do run a dehumidifier at this time of year (the worst, in my opinion) but most of the year there is little or no condensation problem. In fact, the worst condensation tends to be on the *outside* of the windows!

I see there's a piece on this sort of problem in the current Model Engineers' Workshop, which I picked up today, but I haven'r read it yet.

HTH

Tim Tim Leech Dutton Dry-Dock

Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs

I had the gas board fit a gas fire in the workshop. The gas pipe runs along the outside wall of the house and along the garden wall to the workshop. I thought it had to be sunken but no, the gas board run the pipe on the out side walls. Flue goes out through the workshop side wall.

Just keeps a warm background heat to stop the damp.

Lionel

Yep, temperature differential will do it everytime, but damp air tends to be static (heavier, I suppose) and moving it around causes it to change its humidity. There are heat pumps about, big, slow moving fans attached to long plastic big bore pipes, that pump warm air from the roof down to floor level. You often see them in warehouses.

I used to have one in the last Parts Dept I ran and it changed the micro climate almost overnight - certainly inside a week.

I suspect that having a high water table (like Tim Leech with a canal outside his door!) or being unlucky enough to be on naturally water retentive ground is often more of a problem than damp air coming in through the doors and eaves.

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a free frontal lobotomy!