>>>Keith Kaplan said:
> Laying underneath a car, having the floor warm would be very nice. It
> seems to me, though, that it would take many hours to heat up a cold
> slab of concrete, so a heated floor wouldn't give me something I can
> kick on to heat the place in 15 minutes. The timer someone suggested
> sounds handy here.
My home has heated floors (not in the garage, alas) and let me tell you,
jumping out of bed on a cold morning and having you bare feet hit a toasty
warm floor is VERY VERY nice.
It *does* take a long time to heat up the slab (and the gravel under the slab,
and the dirt under that). Nowadays I think some kind of insulation (rigid
foam springs to mind) is put under the slab, but not under the edges where the
weight of the structure is carried. I don't think they were doing this in the
50's when our house was built, though.
We have a "Hydronic boiler" in the garage that heats water and pumps it
through the copper pipes in the floor. It's a closed system, and needs very
little maintenance. We're quite happy.
Earlier homes by the same builder used steel pipes; this is OK if built as
specced, but in the frenzy of the pour workers often let the pipes sink to the
bottom of the slab, exposing the steel to the gravel base and leading to sever
corrosion problems. Many people have installed hydronic baseboard heat to
replace steel systems corroded beyond repair. You have to use a jackhammer on
the slab to expose the pipe. One or two small pinholes can be repaired, but
major damage is prohibitively expensive and the system is usually abandoned.
Palo Alto winters are not very severe either, so our heater actually doesn't
run much, but it works very nicely. By all means, if anyone is building a
shop from scratch consider a heated floor.
--berry
Berry Kercheval :: kerch@parc.xerox.com :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
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