shop heat
thanks for the input, we ask everyone we can about their experiences, we are either going to convert a building on the farm over to a shop or we'd like to build a new house and shop closer to a main highway but can't seem to find a suitable location thats for sale that the county will give us permits to build on, they have been a real pain to deal with and as of yet we've held off spending that kind of money on a building thats not where we live, trying to eliminate the comute just to work on equipment. How thick did you make the floor and how deep are the tubes in the concrete, we have some 30 ton pieces of equipment and we never seem to buy smaller stuff only larger and want to safely drive them in without breaking the cement, farmers are the only ones I've found so far that put in floor heat and six inches seem to be what they went with, thats not heavey enough for me, one heating guy thought maybe put the tubes in almost to the bottom and lay another layer or two of rebar above them for strength and go about 10 inches thick with concrete or 8inches on all bays except one and 12 inches on that one for the bigger stuff? The buddy of mine that had problems put all his trucks and trailers in overnight and packed the shop full and had parts shelves that sat on the floor and just enough room to squeze around the vehicles at night, he ended up leaving the trailers parked out at night and only put his pickups in and raised all his parts shelves up off the ground two feet to help eliminate the problem, his point was make it big enough in the first place to have plenty of floor space he had it crammed so full he had to fold the mirrors in on the vehichles to get them all in, his thought was if you cover or block 80% of the floor space the remaining 20% wouldn't be enough to keep the building nice and warm, he claimed if someone would have told him that he would have made the building 50% bigger, he was used to forced air heat and when you crammed the building full at night everything was warm, several farmers have made the same comment about steel fabrication projects, if you leave large projects covering the floor for several days while construction is being done the shop cooled off to needing a knipco running and when they were done and the stuff wasn't laying on the floor the building warmed back up again, one of them told me he would have made a heated wall four feet tall and set his building on that so no matter what that was exposed was what he would have tried, but their overall opinion was MAKE IT BIG ENOUGH to have plenty of floor space exposed, but most won't admit they spent 100 grand on a shop and it has flaws.