Home, Workshop, Utility, Patio, Garage and Portable Heaters - Reliable Portable Heating

Due to delays getting permits from my home town for renovations/repairs, I've gone from starting some major projects in July to just being able to start them this month. Since the room in my basement where my central heating system is being torn out for the septic pipe repairs and the 1920's era stone basement walls is being strenghtened or repaired as well; I've gone and insulated 3 rooms of the main house to use as a living space while the basement portion of the work is being done. I'm trying to figure out the best way to heat the area reliably in case the weather gets real bad during the next 4-5 weeks . Currently, its an all electric house, but I do have the connections for propane to every room in the house, but leary of using them since they have't been used since I bought the house 6 years ago. If the town had hurried up with approvals, I wouldn't be in this mess, but I have to make the best of it.

Expensive to run, but if you have the capacity on your electric, the portable electric heaters are the easiest to set up. I have seen furnaces and boilers set up on a temporary basis outside the home, but that may have been before code departments were invented.

Bud

As Bud has said, temporary electric heat is your best option.
To use propane you would need to have some kind of temporary chimney.
A direct combustion space heater is also a potential danger and would add a lot of humidity to the house.

You can get 220 volt 4800 watt construction heaters for under a hundred bucks and are designed for temporary use.
All you need is to install a 30 amp 220 volt receptacle to plug it in.
Two or three of these should do a good job of heating during construction.

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Thank you for the link, I'm going to look deeply into it, looks like it'd work better then the electric fireplaces I was looking at and I can transfer them use them in the garage and pole barn when the central heat is re-installed. Also, when I went to a friends house today, I saw propane "fireplaces" he had set up in his living room and den that didn't need venting. I'm thinking of intergrating it into the building plans, he installed them a few years ago, and uses them to augument the central heating. He said they were cheaper to run and easier to install then adding more ducts. Any thoughts on if they're worth adding to the list of projects?

I was looking for a forum to post about the project so I can share problems and solutions that are run across in this renovation. The original house was built in 1892 (what is now my den and part of the kitchen), the main portion and part of the basement were added in 1919-1920, a second part of the basement and 2 rooms were added in 1927 (late 1926 or early 1927), and the final sections (last basement segment and the upstairs rooms + 1 room on ground floor) were added in 1973. There has been 2 years of planning for this, and a lot of red tape. Yesterday they started digging out along the foundation of house to rerun the septic lines and add support to the river/fieldstone wall and we ran into more problems right at the start. :wall:

I would never use a "ventless" heater in my house. In addition to exhausting the products of combustion they vent a tremendous amount of water vapor. It wasn't so bad fifty years ago when houses were drafty but with today's building and energy codes requiring minimal air exchange you are just asking for trouble installing ventless combustion devices.

Thank your for the quick reply. You just saved me from problems down the line (I admit that I've been thinking about it since I saw them). My neighbor who has this setup in his place, his house isn't as old as mine (build in the 30's if I remember right) but I do know it suffers from many of the same problems (newspaper insulation, major drafts, and central heating in only some areas of the house) that I'm working on fixing with my renovations

I don't know if it would work for you, but you may be able to get an old forced are gas furnace from a heating contractor to install temporarily? Position it in the main living area, don't worry about ducts, just vent it outside though.