Thank you all for your useful ideas - that will work - I am only about 30
feet from the end of the house - I hadn't thought of using the main system.

Slán
Gerry

Andy Hall wrote in message
...
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:30:59 +0100, "Gerry"
wrote:

I have a new L-shaped (cavity wall - uninsulated) building comprising
four
stables, a hayshed, a workshop and the last bit at one end (16 ft by 22
ft)
which will either be an office or a snooker room.
I want to have some sort of trickle heat in this office area (possibly
thermostated) just sufficient to keep damp away.
Does anyone have a sensible solution for me bearing in mind that
electricity
costs are fairly high here?

Many thanks


Gerry


You haven't said how far this is from the house, Gerry, but if it's a
reasonable distance you could heat it from the house system assuming
that the boiler has enough capacity.

I had a similar issue in approximately the same space for my workshop.

First of all, make sure that the area to heated is well insulated. I
used 50mm Celotex panels to do this, fitting them inside studding and
applying ply to the faces. Plasterboard could be used for what you
have in mind.

I then installed 150mm plastic soil pipe in a trench between the
building and the house and ran two well insulated 22mm plastic barrier
pipes through them.

At the house end, a stainless steel plate heat exchanger (GEA
Ecobraze) with the primary made a zone on the heating circuit via a
zone valve , and the secondary side going to the outbuilding. There
is a flow switch in the secondary side to control the zone valve.

The workshop has panel radiators plus a pump, thermostat, heating
pressure vessel and filling loop, so it is run totally separately from
the house circuit. The reason for doing this was so that anything
happening to the circuit in the outbuilding including freezing, leak
etc. cannot compromise the house system.
As a precaution, I did use a corrosion inhibitor and antifreeze
product (Fernox Alphi-11) in the secondary circuit, so the temperature
would have to drop to -20 or so for there to be a problem.

When the workshop requires heat, the thermostat operates the pump and
then the secondary circuit flow through the flow switch opens the zone
valve in the house and fires the boiler. The arrangement works very
well and is cheap to operate.

Previously, before insulation, the space took about 12kW of fan heater
to keep barely warm at huge cost. Nowadays, it seldom needs more
than 3kW provided by gas. The thermostat has a timer with frost,
economy and comfort settings which can be set at whatever temperatures
I like and changed manually or automatically. I have mine set to
background level, and then a PIR detector for when I am using the
workshop causes the temperature to be raised.




.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl