tomrscott
Gold Member
Okay, those of you in Arizona and Southern California may not appreciate the problem here. I know that it caught me by surprise when I moved to Oregon from Southern California. Your climate is so dry that a tight roof is generally enough to keep moisture away. This is Oregon, where it rains frequently, on a sometimes-foggy hilltop, where things stay green year round with no irrigation.
Summary:
I am looking for wisdom about keeping a pole building dry enough that tools won't rust so easily. Wondering about the three variables, tight roof (obviously necessary), insulation to maintain temperature stability, possibly needing a heat source either to "cook out the humidity" once in awhile or does it need a constant low level of heat?
Background about my building:
I have a 1600 square foot pole building, concrete floor, 6x6 treated posts, massive joist headers, 2x10 or 2x12 rafters, a large loft over 1/3 of it, corrugated steel roof and walls. The first eight feet of the walls have some plywood on the inside, but I don't know if there is any insulation between that and the steel. Above the plywood, the walls are bare. The roof was covered poorly; it has 3/4" thick tar/felt panels laid down on the joists, and the steel was originally nailed with washer-head ring-shank nails. We are also on a hilltop where it gets VERY windy. The structure is 27 years old and basically sound, but the roof needs to be re-built
We bought the place in the summer and didn't realize till a bad rain how much it leaked. The owner wasn't honest about it. I specifically asked and he denied that it was a problem. Initially, the primary problem was that the vibration of the roof steel in the wind would caused the nails to backout a bit, making the roof looser, this in turn caused the holes around the nails to get widened. Then rain would run down the nails and soak into the felt panels. They would get soggy and heavy and limp, and come loose. Where they came loose, the roof steel was even looser and the holes would get bigger. In short, I need to re-roof the workshop. It is interesting to note that when he built the dirt floor barn a few years later, he used plywood over the joists to support the steel. The concrete floor also has a six foot deep, four and a half foot wide, twenty foot long grease pit in it with a good drain pipe to a french drain pit in the pasture.
For a temporary fix, when we had no money to fix it right, I went up on the roof with a screw gun and a caulking gun. I caulked every leaking nail head, and paired it up with a washer head roofing screw. That has stopped all but one pesky leak that we discovered this winter. It is a very tiny drip on a walkway that isn't doing too much harm other than raising the humidity inside slightly.
My Long range plan for the roof, maybe this summer, is to strip the roof down to the rafters, put plywood, felt, and then steel (either re-using the original, or preferably using new steel if the budget allows).
Getting back to my opening summary, I wonder about the role of insulation and heating at keeping rust problems under control. Right now, even with the leaking almost completely fixed, maybe a few tablespoons a day in one place, the rest seems dry, tablesaw tops and drill press tops all seem to develop at least thin coat of rust pretty quickly. I have tried to keep things oiled with various combinations of WD-40, 30W mixed with some paint thinner to thin it, silicone spray, etc. But it seems like the humidity level is just too high, and there aren't enough hours in the day to oil every tool even once a month.
I have an old large Schraeder wood stove that isn't terribly efficient, but it will make a huge fire and get real hot. I could install it in one side of the workshop and cook the air dry once a month or so. We use a wood stove in the house as our primary heat, so we always have lots of firewood around. I do not have gas or oil. The only other choice would be electric. I could get a couple of those electric powered oil radiator heaters and keep a low level of background heat all the time with those.
I am assuming that temperature excursions, warm followed by cold tends to cause humidity to condense out of the air onto surfaces, and that insulation alone may help quite a lot by keeping the temperature more stable; whatever level of humidity the air is at, the moisture will have less tendency to condense out of the air if the air stays about the same temperature. We are also high enough here that we get a lot of fog, so the outside air almost drips sometimes, it is so moist (not talking about rain, it does that too). The outside temperatures high/low can be as much as 100/70 deg F in summer, normally 65/35, and occasionally into the mid twenties for a couple weeks in winter. We get about 30 inches of rain a year on average, and 150 days of rain, but many of those are very light misty drizzles on an otherwise sunny day. This year we're having near drought conditions, and the farmers (and snow skiers) all want more rain.
I also need to re-weather strip the rolling door, and the man-door. Probably need a porch roof over the man-door too cause it gets a lot of run-off from the roof so it doesn't always have moisture around the sill.
If I heavily insulated the walls and roof, there would be some ground heat that would tend to keep the building fairly warm even without a special heat source. Still, insulation is not cheap and this is going to be tough to budget at best. What is the cheapest adequate approach that you would recomend for insulation in our climate. Should I lean toward energy costs to heat the building, with moderately good insulation to keep that cost as low as I can, or heavily insulate and occasionally cook a hot wood stove to dry the air out?
Any other opinions, thoughts, suggestions, factors I haven't considered?
Thanks very much for your assistance with an aggravating problem!
/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
Summary:
I am looking for wisdom about keeping a pole building dry enough that tools won't rust so easily. Wondering about the three variables, tight roof (obviously necessary), insulation to maintain temperature stability, possibly needing a heat source either to "cook out the humidity" once in awhile or does it need a constant low level of heat?
Background about my building:
I have a 1600 square foot pole building, concrete floor, 6x6 treated posts, massive joist headers, 2x10 or 2x12 rafters, a large loft over 1/3 of it, corrugated steel roof and walls. The first eight feet of the walls have some plywood on the inside, but I don't know if there is any insulation between that and the steel. Above the plywood, the walls are bare. The roof was covered poorly; it has 3/4" thick tar/felt panels laid down on the joists, and the steel was originally nailed with washer-head ring-shank nails. We are also on a hilltop where it gets VERY windy. The structure is 27 years old and basically sound, but the roof needs to be re-built
We bought the place in the summer and didn't realize till a bad rain how much it leaked. The owner wasn't honest about it. I specifically asked and he denied that it was a problem. Initially, the primary problem was that the vibration of the roof steel in the wind would caused the nails to backout a bit, making the roof looser, this in turn caused the holes around the nails to get widened. Then rain would run down the nails and soak into the felt panels. They would get soggy and heavy and limp, and come loose. Where they came loose, the roof steel was even looser and the holes would get bigger. In short, I need to re-roof the workshop. It is interesting to note that when he built the dirt floor barn a few years later, he used plywood over the joists to support the steel. The concrete floor also has a six foot deep, four and a half foot wide, twenty foot long grease pit in it with a good drain pipe to a french drain pit in the pasture.
For a temporary fix, when we had no money to fix it right, I went up on the roof with a screw gun and a caulking gun. I caulked every leaking nail head, and paired it up with a washer head roofing screw. That has stopped all but one pesky leak that we discovered this winter. It is a very tiny drip on a walkway that isn't doing too much harm other than raising the humidity inside slightly.
My Long range plan for the roof, maybe this summer, is to strip the roof down to the rafters, put plywood, felt, and then steel (either re-using the original, or preferably using new steel if the budget allows).
Getting back to my opening summary, I wonder about the role of insulation and heating at keeping rust problems under control. Right now, even with the leaking almost completely fixed, maybe a few tablespoons a day in one place, the rest seems dry, tablesaw tops and drill press tops all seem to develop at least thin coat of rust pretty quickly. I have tried to keep things oiled with various combinations of WD-40, 30W mixed with some paint thinner to thin it, silicone spray, etc. But it seems like the humidity level is just too high, and there aren't enough hours in the day to oil every tool even once a month.
I have an old large Schraeder wood stove that isn't terribly efficient, but it will make a huge fire and get real hot. I could install it in one side of the workshop and cook the air dry once a month or so. We use a wood stove in the house as our primary heat, so we always have lots of firewood around. I do not have gas or oil. The only other choice would be electric. I could get a couple of those electric powered oil radiator heaters and keep a low level of background heat all the time with those.
I am assuming that temperature excursions, warm followed by cold tends to cause humidity to condense out of the air onto surfaces, and that insulation alone may help quite a lot by keeping the temperature more stable; whatever level of humidity the air is at, the moisture will have less tendency to condense out of the air if the air stays about the same temperature. We are also high enough here that we get a lot of fog, so the outside air almost drips sometimes, it is so moist (not talking about rain, it does that too). The outside temperatures high/low can be as much as 100/70 deg F in summer, normally 65/35, and occasionally into the mid twenties for a couple weeks in winter. We get about 30 inches of rain a year on average, and 150 days of rain, but many of those are very light misty drizzles on an otherwise sunny day. This year we're having near drought conditions, and the farmers (and snow skiers) all want more rain.
I also need to re-weather strip the rolling door, and the man-door. Probably need a porch roof over the man-door too cause it gets a lot of run-off from the roof so it doesn't always have moisture around the sill.
If I heavily insulated the walls and roof, there would be some ground heat that would tend to keep the building fairly warm even without a special heat source. Still, insulation is not cheap and this is going to be tough to budget at best. What is the cheapest adequate approach that you would recomend for insulation in our climate. Should I lean toward energy costs to heat the building, with moderately good insulation to keep that cost as low as I can, or heavily insulate and occasionally cook a hot wood stove to dry the air out?
Any other opinions, thoughts, suggestions, factors I haven't considered?
Thanks very much for your assistance with an aggravating problem!
/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
