I've asked a couple of questions here over the years and always had good advice, so now I've got another one.
I'm getting my first shed next week (16' x 10') to be used for storing gardening stuff and to be used for woodworking. I would like to know what would be the best insulation to use & what to do with it. I've also been given a small woodburning stove which I would like to put in the shed and I would like to know if this would be possible.
Many thanks in anticipation of some much needed advice.
The cheaper solutions are to add wooden vertical studding and pack between them with glass fibre wall cavity batts or sheet expanded polystyrene. The best, but most expensive is to use Celotex sheet. This has at least twice the insulating property of the others.
Then clad over it with ply or OSB or even T&G cladding if you like something fancy.
You can do the roof as well and if done before erecting the shed, under the floor also.
If you are going to use a woodburning stove, then there are a whole bunch of issues to deal with including but not limited to:
- Suitable surface to stand it on
- Suitable flue arrangements
- Suitable ventilation
You then have the issue of having naked flame around when using certain materials.
I wouldn't use one in a building of this type and size. It's far better and safer to thoroughly insulate and use an electric heater when needed.
In combination with Andys reply. That's about 17m of wall. Assuming it's 2.5m high, that's 40 square meters for the walls, or a total of about 70 square meters, including the floor.
While it is of course true that celotex is better than ... , it may not be very relevant.
It's important for houses, due to their large area, and constant heat. But. Do you intend to heat the shed to 20C 24*7?
Or would you - which would be fine for preventing condensation - be happy with 2C, and the ability to heat it to 20C relatively inexpensively.
As an example, 5cm of polystyrene has a thermal conductivity of
0.8W/m^2/K.
For 70 square meters, that's 56W/K.
100W or so would keep it a couple of degrees warmer, and a 3Kw fan heater would keep it toasty warm down to -15C or so outside. If you want to work at 20C, and the average outside temp is 8C, then you need about 600W to heat it, or 4p or so an hour by electricity, or 43 quid a year, if used 3 hours a day. If you can run it off the house central heating, then things get lots cheaper.
I would go along with what Andy and the others said. Just add that in my eperiance (having built a workshop and insulated it with 2" thick polystyrene sheets in the walls and ceiling, and then covered it in 1/2" ply) that electric heating is a very easy way to go, and cheap to run in a well insulated building.
I fitted a small wall mounted fan heater:
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has three power settings ranging from 800W to 2.2kW. I added a separate thermostat (just and ordinary mechanical wall stat like that you find on CH systems[1]), and I leave the heater permenently switched on at the 800W setting.
When I am not in there I leave the stat set at about 5 degrees. It hardly ever kicks in - but does ensure that anything stored in the shed does not get damp and rusty. When I am working in there, I twiddle it up to 15 degrees, and it will typically reach that temperature in 5 mins.
[1] If choosing a stat to do this, make sure it is capable of switching the (slightly inductive) load of a heater and has contacts rated for the current. I used one of these:
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