Dust and Workshop in a house basement

[Joe Angrisani]

Guys.....I see that a lot of folks have one in a basement. I am just wondering how you guys deal with wood dust?....

Neander.....

[Alan Schaffter]

I think you missed a decimal point. I get 57.6 btu's for heating the 1 degree temp loss for your shop. If the outside air were only 1 degree different your argument is correct. However, if you live in a northern climate with a 40+ degree temp temperature differential you would need 2300 BTU's for every air replacement, certainly not insiginificant.

I noticed the decimal too.

Actually, you need to integrate heat loss over time, and it isn't that simple, because you will not be heating all the replacement air and won't want to. The best thing to do is to make sure your heater is off when running the DC and discharging outside, because you don't want to heat all the replacement air just to have it immediately pumped outside. You just need to reheat the last batch after the DC has stopped.

Even without a heater, the shop air will quickly warm to the temp of the structure and contents which won't have cooled much and which average about 1000 times the thermal mass as the air. The shop and contents will quickly reheat the air. Eventually you will need to make up heat loss, but that may not be so hard in an uninsulated, below-grade basement, since the soil a couple of feet deep isn't all that cold.

I have a separate heat pump for my shop, but you really need to be aware of what dust will do to it. It has a standard 1" house filter but that doesn't stop much dust as evidenced by the dust streaks around leaks in the duct and fittings. Some of that dust adheres to the heating/cooling coils where it significantly reduces their efficiency.