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I'm repurposing an agricultural building as a research workshop, where sometimes reasonably accurate air temperature control will be needed.
I want to keep it simple, flexible, and cheap.
Rather that fit modern and expensive wall-mounted heaters, which have a plethora of complicated eco-warrior controls usually impossible to override, I’m planning to use three 2+kW oil-filled portable radiators, plugged in.
I’d leave them permanently plugged in and switched on, with the internal thermostats fixed at max.
Then thermostatically control the supplies to the dedicated socket outlets, using a more accurate and reliable wall-mounted thermostat, centrally positioned, which energises a three phase contactor in the DB, controlling the three sockets.
(There will also be central switching with a timer control and the ability to select only one or more sockets, but none of that detail is relevant to my question).
Of course the sockets would be labelled something like ‘Thermostatically controlled outlet: heater only’, and I may use non-standard pin or old-skool 15A round pin sockets.
Another advantage would be that as this is a clean-room environment with white PVC walls, there’s the option to put the heaters away in the summer, or at least to keep the walls behind them clean.
I concede that this is an entirely non-standard arrangement, which usually generates abuse on this forum (?) but I can see no electrical reason why it's unacceptable or unsafe.
Opinions?
ps. These heaters are only to provide maintenance heating within a few degrees. The main space heating is from a 30kW blown-air diesel heater which will be used each morning to get the whole structure quickly up to temp. It's too noisy to be used during work.
I want to keep it simple, flexible, and cheap.
Rather that fit modern and expensive wall-mounted heaters, which have a plethora of complicated eco-warrior controls usually impossible to override, I’m planning to use three 2+kW oil-filled portable radiators, plugged in.
I’d leave them permanently plugged in and switched on, with the internal thermostats fixed at max.
Then thermostatically control the supplies to the dedicated socket outlets, using a more accurate and reliable wall-mounted thermostat, centrally positioned, which energises a three phase contactor in the DB, controlling the three sockets.
(There will also be central switching with a timer control and the ability to select only one or more sockets, but none of that detail is relevant to my question).
Of course the sockets would be labelled something like ‘Thermostatically controlled outlet: heater only’, and I may use non-standard pin or old-skool 15A round pin sockets.
Another advantage would be that as this is a clean-room environment with white PVC walls, there’s the option to put the heaters away in the summer, or at least to keep the walls behind them clean.
I concede that this is an entirely non-standard arrangement, which usually generates abuse on this forum (?) but I can see no electrical reason why it's unacceptable or unsafe.
Opinions?
ps. These heaters are only to provide maintenance heating within a few degrees. The main space heating is from a 30kW blown-air diesel heater which will be used each morning to get the whole structure quickly up to temp. It's too noisy to be used during work.