Add to Hydronic Heating in Garage

[danv]

I Live on Ontario Canada near Ottawa. We have a 40x40 sq ft home on two levels. We heat the lower level (walk out basement) with our oil fired hot water heater (hydronic). We have a forced air oil furnace we use for upper floor heating and air conditioning in the summer. We investigated a boiler when we built about 10 years ago but it was not cost efficient considering we needed cooling in the summer so we went with a forced air furnace in the house. We have a 24x24 sq ft attached garage that I, in retrospect would like to heat to a certain degree in the winter so working in the garage will be a little more comfortable. It is only a 2x4 wall garage but I could insulate and vapour barrier the three outside walls and ceiling to make it work. I have 11 ft high ceilings and a 4 post lift in the garage that I store one of my summer toys on. I have a friend that is in the heating business but would like to get opinions from anyone with experience or opinions on this retrofit. The floor is slopped about 4 inches and I could raise the floor 4 inches with a layer of concrete over the existing slab. The hot water heater that heats my existing lower level is an oil fired 40 gallon 83,000 btu unit. So what are your thoughts. I value the opinions on this forum and have visitied and participated to a small degree here regularly . It is one of my favorite places to visit and I look forward to your responses.

 

[koditten]

If there is no insulation under your existing floor, you will have lots of btu's heading down. Exactly were you dont want it. Your existing boiler most likely won't work.

I love my shop with the floor heat. I keep mine at 43*. Makes the shop floor wonderfull. 65* floors are good enough for me. I'm a welder so i'm wearing lots of protective gear anyways. I'm not out there every single day so this is the trade off for not wasting natural gas. If I did my math right, 65f=4.1C.

I like mine so much that if I was put in your shoes, I would rip out the concrete just so I could have the floor heat, I love it that much. That's my opinion.

 

[tcianci]

Sounds like your talking about adding a radiant floor on top of the existing. I could have read into that incorrectly. As has been posted a radiant floor without insulation under it is going to allow the cold mass of the ground under the floor to **** away a lot of heat. Also, IMHO, I would not recommend a radiant floor if you expect a fast recovery to the desired temperature after opening the garage door. Tha'ts why you see radiant tube heaters mounted up on the walls of service garages, or gas fired hot air unit heater. In any event, you need to do a heat loss calculation for the space you're trying to heat and size your heating appliance accordingly. If I were to shoot from the hip, I would say that your current HW heater based unit doesn't have enough capacity.