Garages and Car Workshop
Garages are usually cold, draughty environments with numerous staff members working in and around vehicles. As no two garages are the same, we offer two caried approaches – heating the whole garage with fan heaters or localising heat with radiant heaters.
Industrial fan heaters keeping a high performance car workshop at a steady 15°C
Garages and Car Workshop Heating
Heating garages and car workshops can be tricky as these types of businesses tend to be situated in uninsulated industrial units, have a fairly open door policy and have a number of staff moving around various workstations.
Working out which system is right for a project is very important and BN Thermic recommend two options. Space heating a garage with large fan heaters or spot heat areas with quartz halogen heaters.
Space Heating with Industrial Fan Heaters
Space heating – building and maintaining a warm body of air within a premises
Space heating is very common in garages as it creates a comfortable environment for staff and prevents a mechanic’s tools/equipment from freezing. When space heating an industrial unit, it is always recommended to use BN Thermic’s OUH3 industrial fan heater range which is manufactured and backed with a 5-year warranty. These units provide an even spread of heat throughout garages and are usually controlled via an energy-saving 7-day programmable thermostat.
When designing a system, it is very important to evaluate how often shutter doors are open as they will affect a space heating system. Unfortunately, when a door goes up, hot air will escape.
Destratification units can help you save up to 30% off your heating bill
BN Thermic offers a free design service for any size garage or vehicle workshop
How to Save Energy
A suspended destratification unit can save up to 30% off a heating bill in a garage when paired with industrial fan heaters. As hot air rises, a destratification fan pushes warm air downwards before it gets a chance to escape through the roof. Destratification fans are designed to live in garages with 4-12m ceilings and are strongly recommended.
On average, air temperature increases by around 2.5°C for every metre above floor level. Therefore, to maintain an air temperature of 20°C at floor level, in a 6m high warehouse, the air temperature at ceiling level would be around 35°C. The net result is a large body of overheated air that is expensive to generate and serves no useful purpose. Click for a recent case study.
Spot Heating with Quartz Halogen Heaters
Spot heating – heating a specific area within an unheated premises
The idea behind spot heating is to directly heat people, not the air within a garage. For this, BN Thermic’s HN3 shortwave quartz halogen heater range is used. Quartz heaters provide instant comfort heat and are ideal for heating people at workstations, vehicle lifts, tyre changing machines etc. For example, a mechanic in a garage might spend 80% of their day around a single-vehicle lift. Spot heating the lift with quartz heaters will keep this worker warm and will avoid unnecessarily heating the whole garage.
Plus, as quartz heaters heat people, not the surrounding air, they are not affected by air movement created when a shutter door goes up on a cold windy day.
Quartz halogen heaters provide instant heat and are effective even when shutter doors are up
Push button timers keep running costs to a minimum by ensuring unoccupied areas are not heated
Energy Saving
The key to saving energy when using shortwave quartz halogen heaters is control. This is done using different types of controllers including push button timers and adjustable lamp controls.
Push button timers – timers energize heaters to stay on for a pre-determined amount of time. They then switch the heaters off once that time elapses which avoids heaters being left on all day.
Adjustable lamp control (2&3 lamp heaters) – these controls are unique to BN Thermic and allow you to control lamps individually. This means a 3kW heater 2 (lamps) can be switched to a 1.5kW heater with one lamp energized. This increases comfort and reduces energy consumption in the warmer time of year.