In this video Tom talks about how he built a metal wood stove to help heat his shop area. The welding/fabrication shop is a six thousand square foot metal building. The new wood stove does a good job of efficiently heating the space.
Tom came up with the design after careful research. It has an air intake at the bottom of the wood stove, that may someday be hooked to an outside air source to prevent recirculation of conditioned air.
Tom built a removable ash drawer to help reduce ash in the stove.
The metal stove is built out of five eights inch plate.
Tom welded in smoke shelves and pipes to help facilitate movement of the fire and heat. One of the tubes holds a thermostat from an attached thermostat motor. As the air gets warmer in the tube, it fires up a blower. Once the fire has died down, say in the middle of the night, the blower will switch off.
Tom also fabricated two pieces of rectangle tube to hold a water/antifreeze mix. A heat exchanger will be added to carry heat from one area of the shop to the shop addition.
One thing that Tom would change on the design is installing fewer smoke shelves on the inside of the wood stove. Having lots of smoke shelves allows for too much ash build up on the inside of the stove. Tom had to drill in several extra holes so that he could blow out the smoke shelves two or three times per year.

This morning Tom and I ventured out to see a large metal frame that had blown over during the weekend. The metal building was being constructed on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie Wyoming. It was to house tennis courts when completely finished. It looks as if the contractor has some cleaning up to do before beginning the building process again.
The first thing we noticed was the large steel frame toppled onto an adjacent building. The adjacent building is similar to the frame and size of the destroyed metal structure. The structure was about 150 feet by 200 feet. It looked as if the entire steel frame had been pushed over like a set of domino’s.

It looked as if the contractor had the main beams up along with the girts and roof perlins. It seemed to have been all tied together at one point. Their may have not been any cross bracing up yet. There also was no tin on the metal structure eitherTin wall on a metal building serve as a big diaphragm that prevent sheer. Metal buildings are designed so the frame has connecting points where the pieces are bolted together. The tin is screwed up against the frame and serves as a deterrent to torquing and twisting of the metal building frame. It is possible that the wind came up and the steel structure began to move slightly. If there were not enough cross bracing in the structure as it was being set up, then if a couple of critical points were effected and the steel webs began to fold a little bit, it may cause the entire structure to topple down. Cross bracing may be the answer to a mess well avoided. Tom describes how he built his shop by first erecting a bay with plenty of steel cable cross bracing. The walls and roof are equipped to handle the load of the unstable beams and perlins. Cross bracing is essential to the building process and also makes for a much more secure structure in the end.

We received an email from Tim in Southwest Oklahoma. He had seen the video we made of our adventures while constructing our metal building shop/house. His main questions centered around our experience with insulation. He wanted to know what type of insulation we used for the home and if we had experienced any problems with home sweating during the winter months. He also asked if Tom had any advice on how to prevent sweating. Thanks for the questions Tim and we will do our best to try and answer them. By the way, best of luck with your building project, Tim, and send us some updates and pictures for our website!

Tim is looking at building an all metal red I-Beam truss system with sheet metal exterior walls. The metal shop/house that Tom built is along those same lines as well. Tom used a basic rip stop vinyl faced fiberglass insulation. Insulation can be purchased without the rip stop feature, but if the temperature gets extremely cold and the insulation gets bumped the insulation could crack. Rip stop insulation is more durable. Tom’s entire building is outfitted with 3 1/4″ bat, R11 insulation and was purchased along with the entire building kit. The bats were 5 foot wide. The inside of the home was framed in the existing building once the building was erected and dried in. The wood stud walls of the house were insulated as well with R13 fiberglass bats, giving the home portion of the building an extra layer of insulation. This created dead air space between the bat insulation that was used to insulate the entire building and the insulation that was packed into the stud walls of the house. This helps elevate any type of large temperature variation between the outside and inside of the house. The air temperature in the dead air space tends to equalize in that zone.
To help answer Tim’s question as to how to prevent sweating in the walls, the shop/house is a great case study.
Tom notices that in the shop, where there isn’t a secondary wall system and the wall and roof structure consists of the tin, bat insulation, purlins and gurts, moisture can form on the building frame when the outside and inside temperatures vary greatly. The cold temperature from outside will interact with the point on the building where the insulation is compressed at the purlins because the tin is screwed in there. The insulation quality is low and the cold air transfers from the tin through the thin area of insulation onto the purlins. If there is any moisture in the shop, say from shop equipment or vehicles that have been pulled in to work on, the purlin temperature interacts with the moisture in the air and does cause a little sweating.
There isn’t much problem with the house part of the building sweating. Really only in typical areas like bathrooms and the kitchen while showering or boiling spaghetti noodles. This may be due to the double insulation factor.
The other thing to note is that Tom’s house/shop is located in an very dry location. Wyoming experiences low humidity year round. The important factor for any building project with regards to preventing sweating is still going to be a well ventilated building.