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Tip: Shop comfort, more productive building

brianwallis

brianwallis

VAF moderator
Hello everybody! I hope you all are doing well. I wanted to make a concerted effort to give a helping hand out to you all. Time is certainly appreciated by myself and my family since I only get to see them on the weekends(because of where I work). When we work on airplanes, it is important to be comfortable and not stressed out completely. This helps you be more efficient and make less mistakes. I'll post a few pictures of how I took some amazing steps to be comfortable and efficient. The first project I'll detail for you all is the radiant floor heating project that is in my hangar. If you have ever worked on cold concrete floors, you know how quickly it saps you of warmth and creates an awful working environment. Comfort is key. I'll also put up some tips on shop organization etc.
 
Radiant floor heat

When you plan your workshop, please try and make it as comfortable for you and your family as possible. Also you want your workshop as close to your house as possible. There are a tons of items to consider for your man cave or workshop. Lets go over the basics and keep it simple. Keep a small fridge on premise for cold water/drinks. Keep a microwave there for heating up food should you be lucky enough to have a visit from family. Put electrical outlets every 10 feet or so. You can never have enough electrical outlets or light. It also is a huge help to plumb air around the workshop every 10' or so as well. Everything should be shadowed in a drawer somewhere except for the obvious things. You and your family will enjoy spending time there if they are comfortable. Don't forget a chair or two and carpet. I've spent years working on cold concrete floors in the Army and swore I would never do that again. For about a small sum of cash, I now have an almost invisible heating system. For those of you who have never felt floor heat, you really owe it to yourselves to seek out one of these systems.
1. The required items are - 1 water heater, one or more rolls of 300' pex tubing in 1/2" or bigger, burp tank, 1 hp garden hose pump, 5 dollar timer,pex crimping tool and fittings.
2. Once the grading is done and the 6 mil plastic is laid down, use 1/4" or thicker insulation (expanded polystyrene) that is backed with foil and plastic on both sides. put down wire and start laying out your zones. You can even put this on an existing floor with electric mats or pex tubing. If you have an existing floor, lay down the pex and then build your sheeted floor on top of the tubing. It's a closed loop system and is very comfortable. Stub out the pex close to where your water heater will be.
3. After the concrete is poured or you have placed sheeting for your floor over the pex, use the simple 5 dollar water valves and rings to connect all your inlet sides together and all your outlet sides together. Install a burp tank, it's really a thermal expansion tank.... and use either the rings or the fittings that just insert and twist slightly. No leaks yet from any of the special insert fittings on the pex.
4. Connect your 1 hp garden hose pump to the inlet or outlet side of the pex with the 1/4 npt fittings and connect the other side to the water heater.
5. Fill and pressurize the burp tank.
6. turn on everything and connect the pump to an automatic timer for 15 min on and 15 min off pump times.
7. The concrete is a pretty good heat sink, it takes a long time for the heat to leave it. It's not instant heat either. No fumes, no mess. It's nice!
 
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Data for beta test

The concrete was always between 55 degrees on the sides and 58 degrees in the middle. I turned on the water heater, let it heat up and then plugged in the 1 hp water hose pump into the timer. One zone heated up to 72 degrees very quickly. Each zone was about 5 feet across in a 40x50 bldg. All zone valves were opened late at night. The 60 Gal water heater tank transferred all it's heat in about 8 min to the floor with 5 zones working. The sixth needs a repair before its used. The saw cut the tube during construction while cutting the relief cuts on the slab. The floor seemed to heat up about 2 degrees per cycle every 30 min. The next morning the floor was an avg of 69.5 degrees, the entire building was warm and comfortable enough to wear shorts. I know my son prefers a warm floor to something ice cold. The floor had reached it's balance point for heating with the energy available through the 60 gallon water heater. Seeing that I only need two zones instead of 5, I'm confident that this is more than enough power for now. I'm waiting on the power bill to see what the damage will be. The outside air temp was in the 50's. It looks like it only needs about 5 hours to heat the floor fully. After turning off the floor heating system in the morning, the floor measured an average of 65 degrees that evening. It was still warm and comfortable in the building. I hope this helps and I hope it lets you all spend more time with your family building your aircraft.
Best,
Brian Wallis
ps.. total cost estimate - 1,000.00 for a 2000 sq ft building.
 
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more comforts

In an effort to be nice to the wife, it behooves you to hook up a washer and dryer if you have the room. Don't take super nasty oil soaked rags to the good clothes washer unless you prefer sleeping on the couch. Make sure you have some storage room set aside or some shelves for what the wife needs to store outside of the house. Workshops can be very dangerous but with the right planning and supervision, building your dream airplane can be an incredible experience for everyone... Be nice to family, you'll never know when you need them to crawl somewhere to rivet something in an very small space. Make it warm or cool enough depending on where you live and somewhere that is enjoyable to be. Get an air conditioner at the minimum and maybe a dehumidifier if possible to keep things from rusting. Plug up the air compressor outside the building in some sort of box to quiet it down. It drives everyone crazy to hear the big compressor start up in a small space. Don't forget pads or blankets! If you are standing in an area, please put down some sort of padding. Your knees and feet will really appreciate it at the end of the day. I've got a large commercial kitchen rubber mat and it makes a world of difference. If you guys want, I can show you exactly what I purchased and where so you can do the same. I"m pretty sure I could install the whole floor heating system in 1 day now.
Merry Christmas!
Brian Wallis
 
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A typical water heater has an output of 4500 Watts. A typical 2000 sq ft well insulated house is going to need three times that amount to maintain 70F indoor temp when outdoor temp is around 20F. If you just want to keep the concrete warm for working and heat the air with something else you'll be fine. At any rate you will see a big power bill if ran continuously. The important thing is to insulate the perimeter concrete very well and keep drafts to a minimum. Maybe try heating just the zone beneath your work area, preferably away from exterior edges. A typical air source heat pump is going to be 3-4 times more efficient than electric heating elements. I have a 1.5 ton 16 seer hp on my 24 X 24 1 1/2 story work shop. It pulls about 7 Amps at 240V and puts out about the same amount of heat as that water heater, which pulls around 20 Amps. Of course, $1000 is a better than $5000+. I too never cared for those cold Army hangar floors. While building our -10, I used an old blanket or plywood(if drilling) and kept the air temps up with the hp. Yes, one reason we finished in two years.
 
Free Heat

The water heater connected to the Radiant heat system is the 24 hr 365 day reliable heating source, the next step in the project is to build a small enclosed box with an acrylic lid facing the sun. If it's daylight and the sun is peeking through, the water heated by the sun will get super hot very quickly. That's free heat other than paying for the electricity to run the pump. People have boiled water before on Mt Everest using this technique. I'll start with 300 ft of Pex tubing painted black in an insulated box on the roof. Data should be forthcoming fairly soon. Gotta be comfy while building the -9!
Best,
Brian
 
I like the theory and execution. I'm thinking about similar here in Florida (yeah the northern part can get cold). What I'm trying to figure out is if I circulate just ground water which is a constant 72 degrees here (spring water). I'm wondering if that will get me enough temperature to warm the floor to even around 60 degrees or something.

As stated once the concrete gets cold it doesn't matter how warm it may get during the day it almost never gets the floor warm and your feet are freezing and hence the rest of you.

I was just going to sink a second well or combine with existing and pump water in a closed loop system.

Thoughts?
 
niblettda said:
I like the theory and execution. I'm thinking about similar here in Florida (yeah the northern part can get cold). What I'm trying to figure out is if I circulate just ground water which is a constant 72 degrees here (spring water). I'm wondering if that will get me enough temperature to warm the floor to even around 60 degrees or something.

As stated once the concrete gets cold it doesn't matter how warm it may get during the day it almost never gets the floor warm and your feet are freezing and hence the rest of you.

I was just going to sink a second well or combine with existing and pump water in a closed loop system.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

When you first turned it on you might be able to maintain 60-65F slab temp with outside temp in the 40-50F range. But due to the greater loss out of the slab than what can be picked up through the earth, loop temp will slowly drop. Now add a geothermal hp and you can go alot longer before it pulls the earth temps down below freezing. We have loop temps of 55-60F at the beginning of winter and down to 10F by Spring.

Now the solar water heat in Florida is a great idea. Not so much in N. Georgia where we used to live and forget it up home here in Ky.
 
Yes

N15JB said:
On Mt Everest water boils at a very low temperature. You can stick your hand in it.

Jim Berry
RV-10
Click to expand...
Jim is correct, the boiling point is lowered about 1.8 degrees F per every thousand feet up. It was simply an example. If you are in Florida, I would just use the sun to heat the tubing, cheap and works great! Don't waste time digging holes in the yard to heat your small floor. If you insulate the pad, you should be golden! Don't forget, if you pressurize your system, even if you are at a high altitude, you can run hotter than the change in state temp - example- car radiator.
 
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Solar doesnt work at night, thus the slab will be coldest at the break of day, and if you are a morning person, well............

But, the real question as I see it is----what will it cost to drill a hole in the ground??

The mention of warm ground water also said it was a spring, so the well may not be needed, or not very deep is it is needed.

Look at all the factors, the answer should become apparent.
 
Maximum surface temperature of a black object in full sun is about 253*F. This can be increased to 620*F by trapping the radiation. A sq meter of black area exposed to bright sunlight will absorb 746 W or 1 HP of energy. Use low-iron tempered glass instead of float glass. You can store heat in insulated water tanks or rocks for later use. It takes 4 lbs of rocks to store the same amount of heat as 1 lb of water at the same temp. You need 1.3-2.5 gallons for every sq ft of collector area.
 
Mike S said:
the slab will be coldest at the break of day
Click to expand...

My shop is heated by geo-thermal heat pumps. The ground water does not need to be hot or even warm, it just needs to be liquid.

As Mike noted, unheated, the slab is coldest at the start of the day. If I set my shop thermostats to 50, 55, or 60, the geo-thermal unit works from about 9pm to about 8am. All it is really doing is holding the slab from getting cold. Once the sun is up, the building starts to warm and the thermostat never kicks in. The shop comes up to about 65 during the day.

It's definitely not for everyone but my shop was built for full time use.
 
Things I did.

1) Hot and cold Air-con, I was able to work year round.
2) Carpet the floor around work benches
3) An office chair with the back and hand rails removes
4) always cleanup after the day, so the new day start off well.
 
poor man's solution

Best Christmas present ever from my wife:

A full length (step in, zip up) heavy duty, insulated body work suit. Perfect for the 40 F California winters in an unheated hangar.
 
I've got the close covered
F54892B4-7B6C-4AFE-99FF-A9E6E072E5A1-6268-000003D0ADA08FF5.jpg

Too busy working/poor from working on plane so for $150 I wired (literally)
up a 6000 Btu 220 heater. It was 12 degrees last night...
C684D6F4-A2CC-4092-B219-5D83624BF056-6268-000003D00435ACB3.jpg

Speaking of Refreshments...
81AE7AD8-AB46-4DDF-BA74-AC67E6D8041B-6268-000003CFEBE00924.jpg
 
I designed my house around the plan view drawing of an RV7 (so I could fully assemble at home before the trip to the hangar).

Shop floor is solar heated water radiant. Plenty of storage plus LP boiler so AM is no issue.
 
Crabandy is close to the kitchen, beer and heat. What more does one need. It is 22F here this morning. Finally some sunshine for a few days. If only we had some way to pipe sunlight in from Arizona. Very little wind here either or I would have a turbine up on the hill. We do have plenty of wood(dying white oaks) to burn. My power bill drops $100/month or 40% when I use the wood burner. Nice for any breakfast, steaks, baking potatoes, soup beans, hot chocolate and smores. It is nice and relaxing to sit and watch. We thought about one in the shop but too many flammables around. Could have gone with an outdoor model but not for $8,000. Stay warm and stay out of the beer fridge while running the bandsaw or rivet gun.
 
For comfort you also need...

A couch to sleep on when the girlfriend/wife kicks you out for spending too much time in the hangar. So, yeah. Um, don't ask me how I know about that one.:(
 
brianwallis said:
The water heater connected to the Radiant heat system is the 24 hr 365 day reliable heating source, the next step in the project is to build a small enclosed box with an acrylic lid facing the sun. If it's daylight and the sun is peeking through, the water heated by the sun will get super hot very quickly. That's free heat other than paying for the electricity to run the pump. People have boiled water before on Mt Everest using this technique. I'll start with 300 ft of Pex tubing painted black in an insulated box on the roof. Data should be forthcoming fairly soon. Gotta be comfy while building the -9!
Best,
Brian
Click to expand...

That is very similar to the heating system for our whole home. I wouldn't want to go back to a forced air heat system. This morning it was 18 outside and teh floor was warm to my bare feet. Also, when you open the door and the cold air blows in,everything is pretty well back to warm as soon as the door is closed. It's the only way to go. Unfortunately my garage was not included in the heat system...

it will be Luke...

whos-your-daddy-darth-vader-shirt.gif
 
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