- Joined
- Jul 8, 2018
- Messages
- 880
I know the how-do-I-heat-my-shop-in-winter topic has been done to death, so I'll try to keep this pretty limited in scope.
Recently, I reached the limitations of the shop in my basement with its benchtop equipment. There is a barn on my property with a concrete pad the size of a single car bay. To make a long story short, I built a shop on that pad, and acquired some full-sized machines (14" lathe, knee mill). The walls and ceiling of the shop are insulated (~R21 on the walls, ~R30 on the ceiliing), but the concrete pad is not. The shop is 12x28 ft, so 336 sq ft.
Winters here (NH) get cold, 2018 being a great example - about three months solid where it didn't get above freezing, with lows somewhere around -10, -15 degrees for a week or two at a time.
Ideally, I would heat the shop 24/7 to 35-40 deg (F), but that seems impractical for reasons others have mentioned. So I'm looking at some sort of as-needed heat: a kerosene/propane heater with the door (into the rest of the unheated, uninsulated barn) open, or an electric heater.
What I would like to know is: what are the drawbacks to leaving the shop unheated in such conditions? Specifically, do oils and solvents and the like need to be removed from the shop during winter? Do sensitive measuring instruments (dial indicators, micrometers, gage blocks/pins, etc) suffer from being stored so far from their operating range? Will repeatedly heating the room from well-below-freezing temperatures cause long-term problems in any of these?
Recently, I reached the limitations of the shop in my basement with its benchtop equipment. There is a barn on my property with a concrete pad the size of a single car bay. To make a long story short, I built a shop on that pad, and acquired some full-sized machines (14" lathe, knee mill). The walls and ceiling of the shop are insulated (~R21 on the walls, ~R30 on the ceiliing), but the concrete pad is not. The shop is 12x28 ft, so 336 sq ft.
Winters here (NH) get cold, 2018 being a great example - about three months solid where it didn't get above freezing, with lows somewhere around -10, -15 degrees for a week or two at a time.
Ideally, I would heat the shop 24/7 to 35-40 deg (F), but that seems impractical for reasons others have mentioned. So I'm looking at some sort of as-needed heat: a kerosene/propane heater with the door (into the rest of the unheated, uninsulated barn) open, or an electric heater.
What I would like to know is: what are the drawbacks to leaving the shop unheated in such conditions? Specifically, do oils and solvents and the like need to be removed from the shop during winter? Do sensitive measuring instruments (dial indicators, micrometers, gage blocks/pins, etc) suffer from being stored so far from their operating range? Will repeatedly heating the room from well-below-freezing temperatures cause long-term problems in any of these?