So, we're moving from a room in 2nd floor apartment, to a our own ground floor apartment with 2 bedrooms and a garden. Now, the Mrs wants to be able to have a garden space to herself and I have just the idea. In the garden is a concrete base suitable for a garden shed. This will not just be any ordinary shed - it will be a 'MEGA SHED'. I'll get around to explaining a bit more in a second.
Currently the base is a bit janky, so the plan is:
Now the size hasn't been confirmed, but the pad looks to be perfect for a standard 8 x 6 ft (2.43 x 1.83m) to 8 x 8 ft (2.43 x 2.43m) shed.
The specific one hasn't been decided on, but the general line of thinking is a shed with windows on one side and a double door - something akin to this:
Good shed, right? WRONG!
It's just a boring shed - and not worthy of the title MEGA SHED! What makes it a mega shed? Well, here's the plan/half-baked-idea:
Interior walls lined with insulating material such as rockwool - marine plywood board over the top of the interior battens and roof to create a more weatherproof shed all round, more air-tight, warmer in winter, cooler in summer and also slightly more practical for mounting things internally.
The floor of the shed has to be more than the standard 3/4 inch (18mm) plywood bullshit - I want 1 inch thick (25.4mm) tongue and groove over treated hardwood joists, so there's an air-gap and water barrier between the floor and the concrete. However, I plan to place a thin polyolefin insulating sheet, then some more marine plywood between the joists and the tongue and groove, in order to provide more insulation and water/air resistant barrier.
Of course then there's the insulation of the door, similar to the interior wall panels, and installing a draft excluder 'step'.
This makes a mega shed? No! That's just a nice shed now!
So what now? We have a well insulated shed that's ready for fitting out - the plan now is...ADD ELECTRICITY!
However, the shed is a green space for more than just plants, why not make it entirely self sustaining? For this, we're going to need to go off-grid.
Now 250 to 360W panels are pretty easy to get hold of for cheap - and as the planned shed design is an 'Apex' roof, one panel per roof side would provide between 500 and 720W of input power (best case scenario). That should be enough for the load that'll be drawn on a bad day, but I still think we need some redundancy in case of long nights and really shite weather. BRING IN THE VERTICAL HELIX WIND TURBINE! They're surprisingly compact and less than a metre high and because it's vertical, it can be mounted anywhere in the garden.
These typically generate around 300 to 500W of power at a wind speed of 10m/s (22 MPH) - Of course, even in the UK, the wind speed rarely gets quite that high and is usually about half that. Most of the curves of the turbines are pretty stable, so let's be conservative and say 150 to 250W of usable power on average as a boost.
Feed both the solar and wind sources into an MPPT charge controller and feed the output into two 12V AGM (or potentially LiFePO4) batteries in parallel that can be partially hidden in the void space between the inner and outer walls. Total power? Well, if the solar is REALLY bad, say 50% from the solar gives us 305W of power. Add the wind at it's worst and we have 150W - we're at 455W - nearly HALF A KILOWATT!
Now the idea is, we don't need an inverter, we're not running anything that's going to require mains power.
Lighting will be all LED - four to eight short 'warm' temperature LED strips for general lighting. Each strip uses around 5 watts at 12v, so a total of 40 watts of power there.
For the grow lights - each of these is around 50 watts, and there's likely to be 3 of these - another 150W, bringing the total to 190W of power in total. This leaves 265W of 'spare' power. What can we do with this? Well, let's add a few USB power sockets and some 12v car-style outlets (for things like a dustbuster, phone charger, bluetooth speaker etc) - trims this back to 200W or so (assuming you're loading all of them simultaneously). Now what about what's left?
My final idea is - heating. During the summer, not needed, but winter in the UK can be bitter as hell and how nice would it make working in the shed if it's somewhere above freezing? There's plenty of ways to do this, but honestly, the best way i can think of, is to have a standard UK style radiator (easily obtainable for cheap) mounted on the far end wall, being fed by a small immersion heater. This would probably have to be custom made (or adapted from another application) to fit into a small size, to go next to the radiator. You can get 12v immersion heater elements, available in 100/200/300/400W ratings, for pretty cheap. Let's choose a 200W part. Fit that into the tank with a thermostat and make up a loop with a small 12v water pump, giving you a small, self contained central heating setup!
Connect the pump and the immersion heater to a timeswitch so that it's only active for a little bit overnight and you're being frugal with the batteries so as to not run them down too far. Coupled with the added insulation and hopefully, that'll keep everything nice and cosy. The ideal temperature would be around 19*c.
Now in the summertime, the heater would be mostly redundant, and instead you'd need something for airflow - so the idea was to build in some 12v PC style 140mm fans, although i've not thought about where or how, as that'll be dependant on the end shed design.
Now *that* is how we build a MEGA SHED!
Currently the base is a bit janky, so the plan is:
- Break up existing concrete blocks to create a hardcore base material, fill the hole
- Lay down concrete rebar mesh
- Pour over readymix concrete with self-levelling compound & drying accelerant
Now the size hasn't been confirmed, but the pad looks to be perfect for a standard 8 x 6 ft (2.43 x 1.83m) to 8 x 8 ft (2.43 x 2.43m) shed.
The specific one hasn't been decided on, but the general line of thinking is a shed with windows on one side and a double door - something akin to this:
Good shed, right? WRONG!
It's just a boring shed - and not worthy of the title MEGA SHED! What makes it a mega shed? Well, here's the plan/half-baked-idea:
Interior walls lined with insulating material such as rockwool - marine plywood board over the top of the interior battens and roof to create a more weatherproof shed all round, more air-tight, warmer in winter, cooler in summer and also slightly more practical for mounting things internally.
The floor of the shed has to be more than the standard 3/4 inch (18mm) plywood bullshit - I want 1 inch thick (25.4mm) tongue and groove over treated hardwood joists, so there's an air-gap and water barrier between the floor and the concrete. However, I plan to place a thin polyolefin insulating sheet, then some more marine plywood between the joists and the tongue and groove, in order to provide more insulation and water/air resistant barrier.
Of course then there's the insulation of the door, similar to the interior wall panels, and installing a draft excluder 'step'.
This makes a mega shed? No! That's just a nice shed now!
So what now? We have a well insulated shed that's ready for fitting out - the plan now is...ADD ELECTRICITY!
However, the shed is a green space for more than just plants, why not make it entirely self sustaining? For this, we're going to need to go off-grid.
Now 250 to 360W panels are pretty easy to get hold of for cheap - and as the planned shed design is an 'Apex' roof, one panel per roof side would provide between 500 and 720W of input power (best case scenario). That should be enough for the load that'll be drawn on a bad day, but I still think we need some redundancy in case of long nights and really shite weather. BRING IN THE VERTICAL HELIX WIND TURBINE! They're surprisingly compact and less than a metre high and because it's vertical, it can be mounted anywhere in the garden.
These typically generate around 300 to 500W of power at a wind speed of 10m/s (22 MPH) - Of course, even in the UK, the wind speed rarely gets quite that high and is usually about half that. Most of the curves of the turbines are pretty stable, so let's be conservative and say 150 to 250W of usable power on average as a boost.
Feed both the solar and wind sources into an MPPT charge controller and feed the output into two 12V AGM (or potentially LiFePO4) batteries in parallel that can be partially hidden in the void space between the inner and outer walls. Total power? Well, if the solar is REALLY bad, say 50% from the solar gives us 305W of power. Add the wind at it's worst and we have 150W - we're at 455W - nearly HALF A KILOWATT!
Now the idea is, we don't need an inverter, we're not running anything that's going to require mains power.
Lighting will be all LED - four to eight short 'warm' temperature LED strips for general lighting. Each strip uses around 5 watts at 12v, so a total of 40 watts of power there.
For the grow lights - each of these is around 50 watts, and there's likely to be 3 of these - another 150W, bringing the total to 190W of power in total. This leaves 265W of 'spare' power. What can we do with this? Well, let's add a few USB power sockets and some 12v car-style outlets (for things like a dustbuster, phone charger, bluetooth speaker etc) - trims this back to 200W or so (assuming you're loading all of them simultaneously). Now what about what's left?
My final idea is - heating. During the summer, not needed, but winter in the UK can be bitter as hell and how nice would it make working in the shed if it's somewhere above freezing? There's plenty of ways to do this, but honestly, the best way i can think of, is to have a standard UK style radiator (easily obtainable for cheap) mounted on the far end wall, being fed by a small immersion heater. This would probably have to be custom made (or adapted from another application) to fit into a small size, to go next to the radiator. You can get 12v immersion heater elements, available in 100/200/300/400W ratings, for pretty cheap. Let's choose a 200W part. Fit that into the tank with a thermostat and make up a loop with a small 12v water pump, giving you a small, self contained central heating setup!
Connect the pump and the immersion heater to a timeswitch so that it's only active for a little bit overnight and you're being frugal with the batteries so as to not run them down too far. Coupled with the added insulation and hopefully, that'll keep everything nice and cosy. The ideal temperature would be around 19*c.
Now in the summertime, the heater would be mostly redundant, and instead you'd need something for airflow - so the idea was to build in some 12v PC style 140mm fans, although i've not thought about where or how, as that'll be dependant on the end shed design.
Now *that* is how we build a MEGA SHED!
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