Garage Furnace Advice
 

As some of you may know from my earlier post about my concrete floor. I am having a garage/shop built. It is 30X44' w/ 12 foot ceiling and "bonus room" trusses for an upstairs, mainly to just store parts etc.. It is 2X6 framed and will be well insulated. I've ran a gas line out (underground) from my house and plan to put a gas furnace in it to heat it.

My thought has been to put a house style high efficiency furnace and duct work in it and locate the furnace in the upstairs and pipe ducts down the back wall of the building. I may block them out to the interior of the wall so as to not take away from my insulation inside that wall.

I'm looking for advice....... Is my plan a good idea or would you recommend another option for the furnace and/or location of furnace etc..

Thanks in advance for your thoughts - as always they are appreciated.

I have a friend that has the same size shop with a bathroom and small open office area. For years he had his furnace in the corner sitting on a return plenum and just a 5' stick of 12" with a 90 pointing out towards the other corner.

The more time I spent in the shop the more it bugged me. I ended up running across the back wall reducing from 12" down to 8", each of the 3 bays have a stub about 3' out with a grill on the end. I put balance dampers in each run and a drop for the bathroom. All exposed round pipe, looks good.

His place is set at 60 when he's around, down to 50 when he heads outta town. About the only difference he's mentioned is it looks better and warms up quicker.

:cheers:
Dan

I have a 30x40 2x6 10ft walls. I heat it with a hotdawg heater I believe I ordered it from air and water out of nebraska. The walls have 2 inches of spray foam and 4 inch batting over that. My only though with the house style heater would be trying to have it upstairs in a central location so your ductwork would go out 20 feet in each direction. It would be interesting to know how much it will take to heat the upstairs part of the garage, might not take much at all. How much will you be in that area? One nice thing is you could hook up central air to the house unit that would be nice. It will be -10 at least tomorrow morning and probably about 35 in the garage with no heat on.

Are you happy with it?

Brandon
I think using a standard gas furnace,upstairs is a great idea. Why not run duct work in between the floor joists and have the vents come out the ceiling on each side of the building. This way you only have floor vent style covers on the finished ceiling, and are able to have heat above your garage doors(your biggest heat loss) and also not affect any lights,ceiling fans,or other things you would mount on the ceiling. Just a thought?
Travis

I have a HotDawg in my 26x40. 2x4 walls and 14" of insulation in the ceiling. It's plenty warm in there. The thermostat stays on 60 all the time.

If I were building, I would go the house furnace/duct work route and have Air Conditioning installed as well.

I've been thinking about this too. My shop is 27x44 inside with 13' ceilings. My dad is in the propane business so I'm hoping he can score me a used furnace cheap. I like the idea of having the ability to add ac to it if I wanted to.

My friends that have a traditional furnace, are always complaining about the costs to heat. So, a friend has a infrared radiant tube style heater. His fuel costs are about 50% less than my friends. There is different configurations, so it is not a straight tube. You can do U-Tube as well. Just need to plumb the gas tubing on one end and have the vent on the other end. You save about 50% in fuel costs per year to heat. Here is a thread on where, I posted the other options.
https://lateral-g.net/forums/showthread.php4?t=39699

Do you plan to paint in the garage? If you do then you need an exhaust vent. As far as A/C units, there is a few options. Well, a friend has 40 x 28. He just has the window a/c style, but another option is the Split System.
http://www.residential.carrier.com/p...ll/index.shtml

Have you planned your lighting? I use T5-HO, but they work great. Each bulb lasts about 10,000 hours and use less electricity than T-8. You need to plan out your lighting, if you want to do infrared radiant heat. When I bought my T-5 HO in 2009, they weren't available but here is where I bought mine.

Jeff
http://www.vaultgarage.com/garage-lighting/

My 30 X 48 shop has 21' to the peak - 14' sidewalls... I live in "Seattle" so it's a moderate climate.

6" walls and joists -- with 6" bat insulation.

I heat the entire space using only the T12 HO fluorescent lighting... but it's ON 24/7 in the winter. The upstairs area is TOO WARM... it's 70* on the lower floor. My electric bill is less than $300 a month.

Thanks for the info. I hadn't even thought about the natural gas radiant heaters. I will definitely look into them. I won't be doing any significant paint work in this shop - -maybe just a little primer. I will take things to a paint booth to spray.

I will likely just put a window AC unit and run it when it gets really muggy just cut down on the humidity. The garage will be very shaded by some large surrounding trees so hopefully it won't get super hot!

As far as lighting goes, I've been planning to run T8's all along - and plenty of them. Are the T5's that much better (worth the money?).

Thanks again.

I should have just started a general Advice thread for this project......... I can see this one turning into that!

Thanks again everyone.