Radiant heat garage floor - retrofit??

[Fluid Power]

Originally Posted by GregWeld

The problem with infrared heaters that glo red hot is that they also heat you... and I don't know about how you guys feel but when I'm working on stuff I don't like to be heated... I want to work in a warm vs cold environment. So placement of this type of heating is really important. Think sitting in a restaurant with a infrared heater too close to you...

When my shed gets past 70* I open a door if I'm doing anything 'active'. It's just too warm to work. I also think below 60* is just as uncomfortable.

I wanted to use heated floors in the shed but it got too complicated with the city codes. Weird codes which had NOTHING to do with a closed hot water heating system... but that's a whole different discussion.

If I wasn't going to heat the shed 24/7 I'd use Natural gas style heat - they heat air quickly and can bring the space up to temp pretty quickly... They're compact and don't require ducting etc. They also recover quickly if you open the garage doors etc to do something.

Electric is just too expensive and too slow unless you heat 24/7 so they're ineffective.

The other thing a guy could do himself is to plumb copper or wirsbo to some water radiator style heaters (around the floor level) and use a hot water tank for the heat source.

just an example of the "tube style" -- there's all kinds of them out there.
http://www.aimradiantheating.com/sto...ment_Only.html

Of course you'd have to have a circulating pump but they're not very expensive and not very big either...

But regardless of what your heat source is -- it's about INSULATION.... and then all heat is BTU's -- and you have to calculate what the building space is going to take.

Greg, the tube style radiant heaters we installed do not glow. Other then the fact that it is warm in the warehouse, you do not even know they are on. You can feel them if you stand directly under them, but they are not like the red hot ones at restaurants that you see or the old style ones that turned bright red when they are on.

Darren