home made shop heaters

we got tired of cleaning up the shop all the time and decided to convert the old horse barn into a shop where we could do the dirty work on the hot rod builds , grinding ,sanding, teardowns. we were working on the little womans 47 ford pickup last nite and the barrel stove we built was keeping it warm enough to work in a t shirt. with all the talent on this web site, there has to be some cool home built shop heaters. lets see em

 

...sounds like an invitation to a fire....I'll stay with a waste oil furnace.


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What is a heater?

 

We just wait till the sun comes up and open the doors.

 

I just use pbr and soco

 

Don't really need a heater down here. A/C is nice.

 

That still has to be better than the salamander heater that was next to my stall in the old JT Carpenter shop in Waco in the early 70's. Broil on one side and freeze when you got 8 ft away

 

I would think a homemade heater would pretty much cancel your homeowners policy.

 

This may be a better question for the fellows at www.GarageJournal.com

 

Come on guys let' hear some alternatives, this global warming shit gonna get us all. I have ditched the propane ( due to the price of propane) for electric heat, ( It's cheaper but not near as warm and still costing a small fortune). Let's hear some good substitutes.

 

The old fuel oil burners work ok with a magic heat in the chimney. Just don't try to paint with one and if it starts bouncing on the floor......shut the oil off and get out of there!

 

Work is the warmest jacket......

 

Check out Mother Earth News' waste oil heater plans. Looks like it would work, and you probably have an old water heater laying around to make one out of. There's pretty detailed "how to" instructions listed, several updated and revised versions have links there as well. Just do a google search for waste oil heater, it'll pop right up.

I use a woodstove, which heats up my 28x48 shop pretty well on all but the coldest days.

 

this one comes up quite often
im sure if you search it you will find alot of opinions on the subject

 

I have such a small garage I cant have a big heater taking up space. I use a small kerosene space heater and a kerosene turbo heater(turn it on for 2 min at a time and it will cook u out in the little garage). You have to buy the clean burning kerosene, so you dont get sick.

 

You already have the barrel stove so here is an alternative heat source for the stove.

Back many years ago we took an automotive oil pump and put it in a small barrel, something like a 15gallon barrel. Drove the pump with an electric rotisserie motor and pumped used oil into the stove. We put a rheostat on the electric motor to adjust the speed of the motor to adjust the volume of oil and that worked best. The other option that we tried was put a valve on the pressure side of the oil pump to adjust the flow. Keep in mind that as the building, and the oil, warmed up, the oil volume increased. We started the fire with wood and would run the oil on top of the wood once the fire got a good start. Our primative version of this was a gravity feed 5 gallon pail above the stove with a pipe entering the top of the stove and a valve in the pipe to adjust the flow.

Neal

 

I have an old Weil Mclain wood boiler heating my shop in Wisconsin. I converted it to run waste oil as well with a drip system and a 34 gallon saddle tank. The whole thing sits in the garden shed out back with the lines running to the shop.

I can heat the 900 sq ft shop up to 50 in about an hour and up to 80 in about 2. The downside to the current oil drip system is it is manually regulated. If you forget to turn down the oil when it hits 210, you will boil the coolant out of the system.

 

holy shit, neal

 

I heat my 24 x 40 shop with a wood burning stove right now. It's installed correctly with the Clas A fuel chimney and everything else you need. I was out working on my car the last few weekends and was able to get it to 68 with an outside temp in single digits. It's ok if you are not going to be doing painting or cleaning with any kind of flammable solvent. This summer I want to put an addition on the back of it (20 x 12) that will be where I put my gas fired furnace. I will only put supply air into the garage with no chance of return to the furnace. The furnace will pull the return air from the new addition. I will install the thermostat in the addition but have it controlled by a remote sensor in the work area. I do plan on doing some spray painting with this set up in the winter & of course the wood burner would certainly be clean of all hot embers. The wall between the new addition & the garage would be sealed and carry a 2 hour fire rating. Access to the addition will only be from the outside and not from the shop. The addition is primarily for storage of motors, rear ends front ends etc. The usual spare parts.

If I am not doing anything flammable I am going to use the wood burner.

 

I converted a 250 gallon Oil drum to a wood burner..for the cold temps we get and have been getting up here it works great!
I work with refractories, so I put a lined refractory shelf and ash pit in it with heavy steel floor grating as its open hearth. I can take my shop from 9 degrees to working temperature pretty quick, and it will take logs thru a door that is 2 foot Sq. and the depth of the hearth is like 3 foot long. Class A tripple lined Stainless steel stack, and it sits off the floor at about waist height..(most fumes lay low)
been running this way for a long time..its a real cozy place to sit back and dream up fun stuff to do.

 

A guy I work with uses wood to heat his house. Due to insurance reasons his wood burner is actually outside and 'X' distance from his house - there is a insulated heat duct running to his house - this is aparenetly some standard product he purcahsed spcifically to keep the insurance people happy. Seems like the concept could be applied to any of the "homemade" furnaces to keep the insurance legit. Just thinking out loud......

 

i made a waste oil furnace like the one in Mother Earth News. hung a 5 gal can above and drip feed it. warms up an area large to work in. if i got rid of all the metal laying around it would probably work better, less stuff to heat up

 

we use a little wood stove, it home made, the stove will start glowing red, but the shop doesnt get hot at all.... i think the best solution to keeping your shop warm is isulate the friekin' think, were missing the foam on more the half the ceiling and half the walls, fixing it this summer

 

outdoor woodstove

http://www.centralboiler.com/

these use almost any combustible as the fuel..

they are so popular in north central PA that a number of townships are instituting height requirements on the exhaust stacks..


I.E.
one guy in my parents neighborhood was exhausting "smoke" literally 8 feet above the ground.. and 15 feet west of his neighbors house!

I have seen them big enough that they can be loaded via a fork truck...

I want one

 

I really like the woodburner I have. It heats the large garage, and there is more than enough to pipe into the house so I usually have little or no heating bill in the Illinois winters.

I saw someone throwing out a fireplace insert. The kind with the really airtight doors with glass inserts.

I took it home for free. I set it on a platform made from concrete blocks mortared together. I welded on an 8 inch pipe to the top of the fire box, welded a 55 gal drum, laying on it's side, onto the pipe sticking up out of the fireplace insert.
Then I welded on another pipe straight up from the oil drum, straight up to the triple wall chimney.

The barrel-in-the-chimney is a great heat exchanger to nearly double the heat output of the fireplace-insert-turned-free-standing-woodburner.
It doesn't use much wood to give out a lot of heat.
Not much heat is lost going out the chimney.

I know that the cooler chimney is supposed to collect more deposits inside, but when I run the chimney brush thru it, there are very few creosote flakes to remove.

A little bit collects in the barrel, but it falls back into the firebox and is shoveled out with the old ash.
I really like the setup. After the free wood from windstorm of a couple months ago, I have a stock of two winters worth of free heat.

 

30 x40 shop, walls, ceiling, doors all insullated. use an old fuel oil furnace to maintain about 40 degrees. hence nothing freezeing. main source of heat when in the shop is a double barrel wood stove. the top barrel has 5, 4 inch tubes running the lenght of it. welded in both ends, no leaks. I have also rigged a container, aluminum. that will hold aprox. 13 gal of used oil. gravity feed thru a ball valve down to the bottom barrel. then plumbed into a steel pipe that is welde into the barrel. you can adjust youre oil flow with the valve, for the amount of drippage you want into the fire. built this last winter after the single barrel that I had rotted out after about 7 years. I also use a set of fans sitting behind the stove to circulate the heat. I can maintain t-shirt weather in the shop all day with about 2 arm loads of wood. allso gets rid of waste oil around the shop. side note, transmission fluid burns 5 times hotter than motor oil and is harder to regulate thru the valve. a full container of oil will last about 1 to 2 weeks.

 

I used a barrel stove for about 5 years but got sick of cutting/buying/begging wood so I put in a gas-fired radiant tube heater.

I've seen some pretty nice home-made wood fired heaters using old boiler tanks...

 

Ok you asked for it. I designed this and me and my friends the Vanderveldes built this in 1986. It has been in service since. The name Vandul is from Vandervelde /Dulmage. Their shop is 40 x 80 with 12 foot ceilings and was orignally not insulated. We live in Ontario where it gets cold. It has no trouble keeping the shop at 70 + degrees and can be run manually or with full thermostat control. Just today almost 23 yeas to the day since we built it the youngest Vandervelde was complaining it is too hot in the shop. first day we ran it in 1986 it was -19F and in a hour we were working in T shirts. At that time all the walls were just 5/8th chip board. It is pole barn constuction building.
Don

 

My dream shop will be a straw bale building with heating and cooling tubes poured into the concrete floor....but I can't help you now!

 

That sounds like the ticket! I periodically dump a cup of drain oil into the stove on the hot coals. Your experience with the viscosity of the drain oil decreasing as the building warms, and the flow increasing, it THE problem the Mother Earth plan pointed out. One guy's improvement was to keep his drain oil in a poly tank on a trailer outside the building, keeping it cold.