Lighting and heater advice

[kerr]

So i will be acquiring a metal shed from her uncle, he's having a garage built so no longer needs it.

Firstly i need some sort of lighting, preferably something i can plug into a socket as il run an extension from the house.

Also as these metal sheds suffer a lot from condensation and seeing as the colder months are on the way i was thinking of some sort of heater, really to put just enough heat to keep frost at bay, and something that's going to be as cheap as possible to run (to keep her happy)

Any ideas?
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aprilia 125 Af1 Futura >> Suzuki gsxr 600 srad >> J1 zx6r >> cbr 600rr >> Speed Triple

[map]

Greenhouse heater? The paraffin type was first thing in my head for a heat source.

Or just get very good insulation, top, bottom and sides.
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[stevo as b4]

Id suggest lining the roof and walls of the shed with the foam backed reflective foil stuff for behind radiators etc. 6m roll's are £4.99 at Aldi at the moment. Cheap and easy to do, and you could use carpet spray adhesive to stick them to the walls.

For the heater, to do what you want from it then a 60-100w electric tube heater should be sufficient to prevent any frost if you leave it switched on during winter nights.

For the electric for the light and a power socket, I would take an old external grade extension lead apart with an RCD fitted, and use that with a double socket preferably an outdoors one if possible. If the cable is going overhead then id probably cleat it to the house wall etc. if it's going on the ground or under ground it needs to be run in a conduit. I'd say plastic gas or water pipe would be ideal for this and strong enough unless it's going under your flower beds etc.

[gavcarter]

I run a very long list of things from an "extension" in my work shop / area / man cave.
I wired numerous sockets, fluorescent lights, hard wired a compressor.
I have about 16 sockets dotted about for power tools.

I wired them as you would in the house in series with one another and then from the closest socket to the house I wired a very long length of decent 3 core cable ran though 15mm flexible tubing ( plumbing stuff), drilled a hole through the kitchen wall and shoved a 3 pin plug on the end of it ( fused and with a plug in type trip meter ).
I shove that in a kitchen socket when I want to go out - infact its plugged in most of the time as I forget to unplug it.....

[gavcarter]

Oh, as for heaters it depends how big the shed is, and how warm you want it....
If you put a bayonet fitting on the ceiling ( a ceramic one meant for snake tanks etc) you can put up either infra red or ceramic heater bulbs ( saves a lot of space as you cant have stuff near a normal heater )

[stinkwheel]

Insulation is the solution to condensation, not heating.

If you make the walls a poor conductor of heat, you'll not have trouble with condensation.

Ply lining with fibreglass underneath would be ideal but possibly a bit pricey. WOuld stop it turning into an oven in the summer too.
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[gavcarter]

Skim read first post, just thought he wanted heat lol....

rockwool can be had for nout if you keep looking, there always some left over at builds etc , or just steal it out of the loft and then it get new stuff put back in on one of these government grant schemes that keep knocking at the door

[kerr]

Fibreglass? rockwool? fuck me im going to be busy
Not even dug the garden up for the slabs yet, severely dislike gardening.

The shed has currently got polystyrene on the roof and walls, its hanging off the walls though, is it up to the job, or would the reflective stuff do a better job?

As for the greenhouse heater, someone mentioned it to me, just gives out an ickle bit of heat, my thinking was covering the bike in a cotton dust sheet in the winter with the heater underneath the bike.
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aprilia 125 Af1 Futura >> Suzuki gsxr 600 srad >> J1 zx6r >> cbr 600rr >> Speed Triple

[Northern Monkey]

[kerr]

Was thinking something more like this
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Electric-Tubular-Heater-Suitable-for-Greenhouse-1ft-2ft-3ft-or-4ft-Tube-/170761439783?pt=UK_Home_Garden_Hearing_Cooling_Air&var=&hash=item27c22cca27
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[Pigeon]

I spent 5 mins putting some stupid post together about lighting and lumens per watt and costs of units, advantages / disadvantages etc then pressed ctrl+w and lost it.

In short. Consider getting HID floodlight. Either Metal Halide (White/blue light) or High Pressure Sodium (Yellow).

Bang for buck, they can't be beaten and they are compact.

I've got a 250w MH for £53

HPS slightly more at £54

[kerr]

[Pigeon]

You could go for the 150w @ £40

It uses a different bulb fitting, which is smaller (both in size and watts) and cheaper, but with less output.

250w HPS @ 28,000 lumens = 112 lumens/watt
250w MH @ 20,500 lumens = 82 lumens/watts
150w HPS @ 15,000 lumens = 100 lumens/watt
150w MH @ 12,500 lumens = 83 lumens/watt
70w HPS @ 5,300 lumens = 75 lumens/watt
70w MH @ 6,000 lumens = 85 lumens/watt
70w Flourescent @ 6,000 lumens = 85 lumens/watt

Generally, as the wattage increases, the efficiency increases also. Although this peaks around 600watts and falls away a little.

Florescent tubes are still comparable in terms of effciency (but not effectiveness). A 70w tube is 85 lumens per watt, same as 70watt Metal Halide. But tubes don't really go higher than 70w without getting much more expensive.

You could buy that 150w metal halide. £40, includes the bulb. It's compact, won't mind being wet.

Looking at running costs, assuming 15p / kWh for electric. It costs you 15p per 1,000 watts.

Roughly speaking 15p buys:
70w = 14 hours 15 minutes (1.05p/hour)
150w = 6 hours 30 minutes (2.25p/hour)
250w = 4 hours (3.75p/hour)

If I were doing a metal shed. I'd go with the 150w metal halide. Cheap to buy and to run, compact design and easy to fit.

150w bulb will cost around 2.25p an hour. Seems pretty good.

You could buy two 70w florescent tubes, but it would cost double, they are both 6ft long AND while the coverage may be 12,000 lumens to match the MH, the penetration won't be. The light diminishes away from the tube. Two 6,000 lumen tubes are not going give the depth of 1 12,000 lumen bulb.

One downside of HID's. They are not meant to be turned on/off every 5mins. In fact, once switched off, you should not attempt to re-start them for 30minutes, otherwise you are likely to blow the bulb!
They also get HOT. But because these are floodlights, the bulb is behind glass.

EDIT:
Oh, and they also take 1-2 minutes to reach full power. When first turned on, they are worse than "energy saving" bulbs, no light for 20 seconds. Then 2 minutes to get the full effect.

[kerr]

[kramdra]

That is a lot of light your talking about. How big is this metal shed?!?!?


My recommendation would be a couple of power LEDs. Plenty of choice, they are cheap, last forever and will light up a normal sized car garage like a UFO has landed in it I dare say a 250w HID would be blinding, consider that a normal house bulb has about 700 lumens and most rooms use only one.

A Cree XML does work very nicely, the 12v variety are ideal for connecting to a spare bike or car battery. I have a small solar panel on roof to keep battery topped up as its 50 meters from house. These use 5-20 watts so battery lasts a very long time.

I have mine attached with a flexible foamy/wire/bendything so it can also be pointed where needed.

Small disadvanage that it is a point light source, it would be better to have several lower power LEDs spread out to prevent shadows.

[Robby]

The floor is also a big heat loss. I've found that old carpet underlay works well for shed flooring. More comfortable to sit on than a cold concrete floor.

[janner_10]

As Kramdra says, either a simple battery set up or use 12v LEDs and a simple cheap driver.

I would avoid the halide idea, they will convert much more power into heat than the LEDs and the life will be much less in hrs compared to LEDs. Plus you will be blinded with that light in a shed.

For mine I used 5 m of https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3528-5050-1M-3M-5M-Waterproof-Cool-White-LED-STRIP-LIGHT-for-Bright-Supermarket-/301242793075?pt=UK_Home_Garden_Night_Lights_Fairy_Lights&var=&hash=item4623783c73

which came with the driver and I cut into strips and stuck to the roof and placed an odd 1m strip above the bench - if you are handy with the soldering iron you can cut them to any length and just daisy chain them anywhere.

Any simple mains frost heater will do the job and as said, definitely bung some old carpet tiles on the floor. I found some on gumtree that were used and free to collector!
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[J4mes]

[Northern Monkey]

My garage uses a 12v car battery (£40 from euro car parts) and 5m of LED strip light (£10 from ebay) to provide quite a lot of light,

The battery needs charging once every couple of months, and needs no wires from the house to the garage
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[iooi]

[kerr]

[Pigeon]

Sorry, re: the lighting, I've made one huge assumption. Which is you want to be able to work on your bike in the shed. If that is not the case, and you just want a light source to see to get things in /out of the shed. Then LED's are a much better suggestion!

I've got a 250w MH at about 6.5ft off the ground and it is bright enough to light up an area the size of my bike square at ground level. But it's certainly not over bright. For my use, probably 300w would have been perfect, but the next size up was 400 and that would be a bit much.

Because the metal shed is likely smaller than a garage, took a guess that a 150w would be ok. But it must be a reasonable size to be able to store a bike......again, another huge assumption, don't know why I assumed it was for your bike.

But if spending hours working on bikes or whatever is not required, then HID is overkill for sure.

[kerr]

I would prefer to have enough light to work on the bike, wee rattle can jobs etc.

The shed itself is 9 foot by 10, around 6 foot high.
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aprilia 125 Af1 Futura >> Suzuki gsxr 600 srad >> J1 zx6r >> cbr 600rr >> Speed Triple

[Pigeon]

[Vincent]

Modern parrafin heaters are pretty good and, unlike the old ones, give off little smell or condensation apart from when being fired up. I have one and run it outside for 5 mins before bringing it in and it's fine.

Google "Zibro Kamin"...they do excellent programmable convection heaters.

Best bet might be a small multi-fuel stove though
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