Keeping a garage warm in winter

evoke

I have my boiler and a lot of pipework in my garage, which is part-integral to the house. It's a small single garage. Most of the pipework is new, as is the boiler.

I also have a new mains water pipe terminating in the garage. Again, this is new. Almost all of the pipework is lagged.

I'm a little concerned about temperatures in the garage dropping to near-freezing over the winter and need to put something in place to stop this happening as a precaution.

Is there a cheap way to heat up a small garage just to keep the temperature above 5 degress Celsius?

gooner63_2

http://www.mailspeedmarine.com/cabin-heaters/mailspeed-marine/tubeheaters3060-306283.bhtml

Wookey

If the boiler is oil fired and +15 years old it will either have no lagging or a simple lagging jacket fitted, if it is either of those then it should be enough to keep the chill out of the garage, just remove the lagging jacket when temp drops low. If it is gas fired or newer oil boiler then fitting a small rad with a TRV on either frost or 1 on its temp scale will suffice. Both will require the heating to be on though which may entail a frost stat being fitted to bring the heating on automatically if/when it starts to freeze.
My own bolier is over 15 years old and is situated in a concrete shed, once weather started to get bad this time last year i removed the fibre jacket to allow the boiler to act as a radiator to help keep shed a bit warmer, worked a treat for a low cost temporary solution. Providing all pipework is properly lagged and as much draught exclusion in garage as you can, you should have no problems.

ormus

how much headroom does the garage have?
insulating the roof will pay for itself in no time.
(as will the walls if possible).

CaptainKidd

I would get somthing along the lines of a small 1kw oil filled electric heater and just keep the thermostat at a setting that will keep the chill off, somthing like this on ebay http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5-FIN-1-KW-OIL-FILLED-RADIATOR-HEATER-SUPER-PRICE-/230701775766?pt=UK_Home_Garden_Hearing_Cooling_Air&hash=item35b6e5bb96

Of course this would only be any good if you have some where to plug it in in the garage.

evoke

I have plenty of power and lighting in the garage. The roof is a flat roof but the ceiling plasterboard is in very poor condition so will need to be replaced and the cavity between ther plasterboard and the roof insulated.

I already have two oil-filled electric rads with frost mode in storage so could use one of those. They provided heating for my house during the renovations over the last few months.

googler

We have a double integral garage - combi boiler in one corner on opposite side from door. Cold water inlet pipe to boiler, and cold water spur pipe to wall-mounted tap at the door. Most of the cold water pipes are unlagged, and haven't had any problems with them over the last 11 years or so.

The boiler is on 24/7, so there's some heat production from that corner to chase the chill away.

ic

http://www.screwfix.com/p/wall-mounted-ch-500p-frost-protector-400w/35719?_requestid=2851198

tony6403

Unless insulating the garage will provide measurable thermal gain for your living accommodation , this is a cost which you will not recover. Many properties ( mine included ) have pipework fitted above 10 inches of insulation in loft areas and there are no heaters.
Where any pipes are exposed just use some split foam pipe insulation making sure that there are no gaps.

ormus

you will certainly recover the cost if you dont have a pipe freeze/burst.

tony6403

ormus wrote: »

you will certainly recover the cost if you dont have a pipe freeze/burst.

And using pipe insulation (split foam is building regs compliant ) will see that this doesn't occur.