Oh your preaching to the choir Deve. For the last 5 or6 years at
my old place I had a 200,000 btu natural gas furnace that was
taken out of a house to heat the hanger. Kept it about 45° all
winter when I wasn't out there and it came up to temp in 20
minutes when I was working. Had no windows and never opened the
doors to the outside so it was like a cocoon in there. It
really didn't make my gas bill all that much more, maybe cost
me a few hundred more to heat the hanger each winter.
But as I said, taint no gas out here and propane is out of
sight.
At the old place, in the summer I ran two 80 pt. dehumidifiers
both of which would be full at the end of the day. Had two
Bridgeport milling machines, three lathes, drill presses, band
saws, lots of wood working equipment and a sizable steel stock
in there for a couple of decades and never had a spot of rust
on any of the bare cast iron or steel. First week that I had
moved it all out here to the barn every thing was rusting up
real bad in spite of my soaking it down with motor oil. Almost
all of my CRS bar stock and structural is all rusted up now.
I never had a problem when I was using the single barrel stove
to heat the hanger. And with the flue going straight up thru
the peak thirty feet above it burned so hot that I never had to
clean it, and I burned it for around twenty years. I changed
out the stove pipe going up to the ceiling once because it was
looking kind of ratty after many years of use but in side was
just slightly sooty, not much at all. Burning that hot is
probably why I had to throw a couple of logs in every half
hour, not to mention how much of a loss I had from using heated
air for combustion. I lined the bottom of the barrel with fire
brick and never had to change the barrel either. In fact a
neighbor was over the other day and couldn't believe how solid
the barrel still is after using it all those years.
Denny Graham
Sandwich. IL
