At the time of writing it is 16 Fahrenheit outside with plenty of snow on the ground so rather than spend a few hours in the workshop I thought it best to update this blog! For most of the year, the workshop which is insulated is a comfy place to work, I have music, often a mug of tea and time passes in a most congenial and agreeable manner. But days like this make it less agreeable and it is hard to get warm and as such the work, assuming that you can actually get stated tends to suffer for it. Work is less productive and if using and sort of adhesive like epoxy then glued joints actually suffer and not make a complete and proper bond.
Up till now I have been trying to warm the place up with electric fan heaters; these do work but warming up the space takes time and if I only want to be down there for an hour or two have to turn on the heaters well in advance to take the chill out of the air. In an effort to address these problems I have decided to install some infrared heating. Available in either gas or electric variants these heaters work in a sense much as flood light does and heats things rather than the surrounding air. Infrared is at the lower end of the light spectrum and is invisible to human eyes but essentially they have 'rays' which when they fall on something tends to heat it up in much the same way that the sun does. That is why when we sit out in the sun we get hot and if we want to cool off we go and sit in the shade. OK so science lesson over.
So with the infrared heater installed things should improve right away. Because we need a direct path for the infrared it is important to install the heaters high on a wall or overhead so there is less chance of things blocking the heater 'beam'. There should be savings on my electric bill too as I shall only need to put the heat on as I need it; switch it on when I enter and turn it off as I leave in much the same way as a light. It is also worth noting that because things are heated with 'light' they
are unaffected by the wind so I should still feel warm even with the big door open when I am working on something particularly dusty. The 3000 watt heater shown costs about $500 but it is claimed will heat over 350 square feet. It will be interesting to see how things improve in the workshop.
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