Even modern turbocharged boilers are far from ideal.
They have a very mediocre level of efficiency, so a huge amount of heat escapes through their chimney. The author of the design came up with a way to use the exhaust of a home boiler to heat your garage. The technical solution he proposes requires the consumption of only 60 W of electricity per hour, which is necessary to power the circulation pump and fan.
What is needed to assemble a heating system
Although the proposed method is cheap to maintain, you still have to spend money on materials. The positive point is that some of the system components can be removed from damaged equipment or purchased from scrap metal. For installation you will need:
- electronic power supply control relay;
- 2 heat exchangers from gas boilers;
- sheet metal for making a box with diffusers;
- pipe made of cross-linked polyethylene or metal-plastic;
- broken air conditioner unit;
- fan (ideally original from the air conditioning unit);
- thermostat;
- electrical wire;
- anti-freeze.
How does heating work?
The author of the design made it experimental, so many technical solutions were intended to be temporary. As a result, the system still requires some improvement. Despite this, using this principle, you can make heating in your workshop or garage even more efficient and aesthetically attractive.
Let's start in order. Near the gas boiler there is an electric relay connected in parallel with the circulation pump that circulates the coolant through the home system. Thanks to this, the garage heating equipment will only turn on when the boiler is running. This will eliminate unnecessary consumption of electricity.
At the chimney outlet of a turbocharged gas boiler, a box with an inlet and outlet diffuser is installed, inside it there are two small radiators removed from old boilers.
From the author's house, exhaust gases and air rise through the chimney, the temperature of which is 110 degrees.
Moving through the box, they heat up the radiators. They are connected to each other in series with a tube.
A cross-linked polyethylene pipe with a diameter of 16 mm coming out of the box is laid in the garage and connected to a large radiator unit from an old air conditioner, transferring heat to it.
The radiator is equipped with the original fan that came with it on the air conditioner. It is powered to the network through a thermostat.Thus, the author excluded the non-stop operation of the fan. As soon as the radiator reaches a temperature of 15 degrees, the fan is activated and begins to blow warm air into the garage.
A return pipe with a circulation pump comes out of the air conditioning radiator unit. It supplies return flow to a box installed on the chimney of the gas boiler. The result is a closed system through which the coolant circulates in a circle, capturing heat in a box on the chimney and transferring it to the radiator unit in the garage.
The circulation pump of the garage heating system is connected to the electrical network through a relay installed in the house near the boiler.
Thanks to this, the coolant circulates in a circle only at the moment when the boiler is operating and hot exhaust comes out of the chimney. The thermostat with fan on the garage radiator is powered from a regular network. All the same, the blower will turn on only at the moment when the actual temperature of the heat exchanger cells rises above 15 degrees, which is only possible with the circulation pump running. If you connect an electronic thermostat also from a relay, then its settings may come true due to constant switching on and prolonged switching off, which is completely undesirable.
An ordinary automobile anti-freeze agent is used as a coolant in a garage heating system. At the highest point of the system, located near the duct on the chimney, there is a venting valve. The garage naturally has an expansion tank, just like any other heating system. The author has not yet dug in the heating main; it lies on the surface, wrapped in thermal insulation. Of course, this does not look very good and leads to serious heat loss, and also causes severe condensation and ice formation.
If you decide to repeat this design, you can use more heat exchangers in the box on the chimney. The author of the idea, the exhaust gases from the boiler give off 40-45% of their own heat, but if there were more radiators, then everything would work even more efficiently. Naturally, the more massive the heat exchanger in the garage, the better the room will warm up. The author of the idea, despite the fact that he did everything temporarily for testing and in a hurry, still always have a positive temperature in a concrete uninsulated garage, even in severe frosts. After improvement, it will be possible to achieve real heat in order to comfortably work on car repairs or homemade projects.
Watch the video
If you are interested in this idea, then be sure to watch the video, where you will get to know this useful homemade product in detail and more clearly.
