Heating A Pole Barn

You will notice that the ceiling of my shop is shiney.. it is 2" foam board covered with a sheet of cardboard and a layer of aluminum foil.. The foam dealers around here offer it that way,, the reflective aluminum reflects the radiant back down on your head/shoulders and on the cars and equipement.. it was noticable when i was installing the foam, one end of the shop was warmer than the other.. and the ceiling is 15.5' high..

John, PM me again about some other shop Ideas i used.. I read them in a series of articles in the auto restoration magazine 'skinned knuckles'.. from around 1993 I think.

Greg L

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Thanks again for the ideas. I hope to get the permit this week and then get started on the site prep.

hi John , remember in 3 years it's never big enough. i know your space to build is limited. if it was me , i would just take a section , build it and insulate it to work in. why do the whole building? you could make a nice work shop and use alot less heat. most of the building is for storing your cars , no , just my idea. have fun and hope all goes as planned.

Please keep in mind all information I donate is 10 years old.

We put in several seat of the pants radiant slabs. SImple systems, tubing, pump, thermostat, although many times we used a "slab stat". A slab stat gets buried in the floor and simply keeps the floor at the same temp all the time. They work very well especially if you have baseboard or radiators in the same area.
A cold slab can easily take 36 hours to start giving off heat. It's not the type f heat you want in a building that you only intend to heat for 8 hours every now & then. We had one radiant house that was anti-freezed and dead frozen (not our idea!) It was almost a week before temps were up to where you didn't notice the cold.
Maybe with injected systems you can go more, but our rule of thumb was no more than 200 feet on a loop. In my house I have about 800 feet of tubing. I have a 3/4" manifold with each of four loops coming off that.

This should do it.

I don't know a darned thing about boilers but that looks like it could pump out some serious heat !!!

I suspect you are correct.

It's home.

everything intact. thats you John.

I won't have it done in time for this winter, but by next year......

What's happenin' John! Good to "see" ya!

I've got a 46' x 36' completely uninsulated barn with dirt floors that I keep at 55* when I'm working out there. I have a 125K BTU kerosene torpedo heater to warm everything up quick, then I have a 90K BTU oil furnace that maintains the temp -- as long as it's not windy. Chest height might be 55* but the floor (which is usually why I'm working out there -- laying on my back) is about 30* -- lots of gaps! Even worse than my house, if you can picture that one! Once it's up to temp, I turn off the kerosene, because,...... I guess my wife likes having me around!

But those heaters are plenty for me. You should have no problem keeping a new place warm, especially with insulation & NO GAPS!

Here is part of MY house ( the wife's house is, well, the HOUSE ) with -some- of my toys. ............I may have a problem.....

Hey Smitty, when you putting a coal burner in there???

I have a kero torpedo as well. Not the best heating solution!

Kerosene Torpedo heaters are great for getting a headache.. I can't figure out if it is the noise or the stink that gets to me first.. but man do I get a headache from them!!

Greg L

I have had one for many years, unless I buy water clear kero it will foul the spark plug. As the plug gets loaded up the smell gets worse.

I actually had it in the cellar last year while I was assembling the Alaska.

I would suspect the headache was from products of combustion and CO, not the noise or smell.

Yea, the headache is my internal thermostat!

I should have kept the Mark I for the barn, but $1000 was pretty hard to pass up, so I let it go