heating an enclosed back porch.....

[bell]

i need to add heat to my enclosed back porsch so i can turn it into my fish tank room (mainly so i can build a 550 gallon fish tank)
the room is 8.5'x11.5' with 7.5' ceiling. this comes out to 733 cu.ft.
walls are decently insulated with windows all around, i have plumbing and electric (i believe there is a 220 for a dryer but it's currently hidden behind a storage cabinet)

what are my options?

i have natural gas in the room next to the porch for the water heater and furnace. but for the size of the room i think electric may be more cost effective.
we were contiplating just adding vents and such off of my existing furnace, but i would like to control the temp in this room separate from the house's main thermostat.

thanks in advance

[Rot 911]

Electric baseboard heat if you want a separate control

[Jims5543]

Heat the fish tank.

[HardDrive]

Electric baseboard is the most painless.

We have a electrically heated floor in our master bathroom. It was an addition outside the walls of the house. The electric coils are beneath the floorboards. Not very accurate way to heat though, and we live in Seattle, where its rarely below freezing.

[Joeaksa]

I walled in my old back porch years ago when I lived in the mid-west and put a hot tub and old cast iron wood stove there. Loved it and had glass from about 3.5 feet to the ceiling all the way around.

Turned out that the solar heat from the sun coming in the room produced so much heat that I opened the sliding doors most of the day and let it heat the house. The wood stove was very nice at night and during cloudy days.

Just an idea...

Joe A

[chuckw951]

You might consider a direct vent gas stove powered by natural gas.

I have a Jotul DV 400 in our living room...it's great and we use it everyday. For daily use a wood stove is too much work IMHO.
http://www.jotul.us/content/products/ProductArticle____3115.aspx

Jotul stoves (and others like it) can be wired to a thermostat. It work like a mini furnance.

The DV 200 is a smaller stove which would be the right size for your back porch. This stove costs about $1200
http://www.jotul.us/content/products/ProductArticle____3113.aspx

You don't need a big chimney either, the stoves can be configured to vent through a wall. I don't recommend "vent-less" gas stoves...IMHO the jury is out on those...I wanted the exhaust gases vented outside my house.




Jotul Catalog

[id10t]

Keep NA natives and don't worry about heat.

Also glad to see I'm not the only one on pparts crazy enough to think about building a monster sized tank.

[bell]

so far i'm leaning towards the electric baseboard setup.
the tanks have heaters, the temps of my tanks need to be stable at 80-81 degrees, along with the 550 gal tank i'm going to build (8'x3'x3') there will be a 75gal, a 60 gal, and a few smaller quarantine tanks, a utility sink and a small desk with my computer......so space is limited for a large heater.

right now with no heat the room is at 35 degrees, it's 10 degrees outside, i looked at a bunch of different mfg's for the baseboard heaters but none i saw show how large of a heater i'll need to heat this room.

what amount of heat do i need to make? (btu's?)
i'd like to keep the room around 60+ degrees as that will keep the tank heaters from overworking.

thanks again

[sixbanger]

What kind of floor are you planning to use? You could use the hot water tank with a small pump and use the heat from that as it will be installed below the floor or the tile.

[id10t]

Well, if you are keeping the 'puter there, just upgrade to a really nice dual AMD system. Mine keeps the room it is in about 15 degrees higher than the rest of the house. When it gets really cold, I just start running SETI@Home to crank up the CPUs more

[bell]

the walls are insulated well but there are decent size windows on 3 of the walls, i can seal those up pretty good with plastic.
the floor is the existing concrete slab, i'll have a large rug in there i can move because the floor will get wet during maintanance and such.

i see that there are elec baseboard heaters which operate off of a thermostat, i'm not worried too much about the cost, my average elec bill right now only runs about $45/month

[Tim Hancock]

Originally posted by Joeaksa
I walled in my old back porch years ago when I lived in the mid-west and put a hot tub and old cast iron wood stove there. Loved it and had glass from about 3.5 feet to the ceiling all the way around.

Turned out that the solar heat from the sun coming in the room produced so much heat that I opened the sliding doors most of the day and let it heat the house. The wood stove was very nice at night and during cloudy days.

Just an idea...

Joe A

Thanks for planting the seed Joe. This sounds like a perfect setup to replace my back deck. My wife insists on having our hottub indoors, so it has lived in one bay of our two car garage.

I park in the hangar, but my teen daughter's car sits out in the house driveway all night which kind of sucks (for her) during winter.

Enclosing my rear deck complete with a wood burner sounds awesome. Now to figure a cheap way to screen/glass it in!

[Rondinone]

You can get single room heat pumps (Japanese, Hitachi) for <$1000. All you need are two small holes for the input/output lines from inside to out. That will be more efficient in the long run.