Mine’s cold too, and completely dark if the doors are closed … I wish I had a place where maintenance and repaiers would be more fun in the winter …
That actually led me to an idea: What if there was a large and modern hangar, maybe with a couple of guest rooms, bath and kitchen, somewhere central in Germany (Europe) … heated, with all the tools, vending machines (and good music) … would pilots come rent a space for two or three days to work on their airplanes?
In the 8ßs there was such a concept for car repairs, all over Germany, but I think it disappeared more or less (not sure)
Flyer59 wrote:
would pilots come rent a space for two or three days to work on their airplanes?
What would happen if there is something wrong/unplanned and the plane is stuck for a week/month?
Park it outside, I should reckon. Not an attractive idea.
What would happen if there is something wrong/unplanned and the plane is stuck for a week/month?
It would be moved outside and we would have schedule for the local busses and trains :-)
Part of the rationale for buying my Cessna 182 and converting it to a STOL Katmai was to operate out of my field here at home. Having established the airstrip I set about getting planning permission for a hangar, an Eco-hangar.
Having built an Eco house I had learn that most houses, even well insulated houses and virtually all commercial buildings suffer from the same problem. The design never includes enough or any thermal mass. Without thermal mass the building will be cold overnight, overheat on a summer day and freeze you to death in winter. Thermal mass slows down this temperature change especially if the thermal mass in INSIDE some serious insulation. It’s the massive temperature changes that leads to condensation and corrosion.
My hangar floor is a concrete reinforced slab onto which is dense polyurethane insulation 100mm thick. Onto that goes steel rebar mesh on 50mm stand ups. Onto that I zip-tied four 100 meter runs of 17mm plastic pipe then covered the lot with 100mm of concrete slab. Now I have a floor which can be heated and the floor is also a huge heat sink.
The hangar walls are 100mm concrete blocks up to 8ft. Next is 150mm of insulation with 100mm dense concrete block inside (see picture below). The wall is another large heat sink. The remainder of the building is Kingspan sandwich 150mm insulated steel panels. Two of us built he hangar in three weeks.
The underfloor heating pipes are driven by a simple ground source heat pump which transfers heat from the pond behind the hangar. The heat pump input is 0.8Kwh and output is 4KwH of heat, COP of 5. The temperature of the hangar is set at 16c. Over the year the minimum temperature is 14C and the max 24c (I don’t cool it, no point). It’s brilliant to work inside, it’s a pleasure. Most importantly, because there is only very slow variations in temperature day and night and only about 1 degree the atmosphere is dry – NO Corrosion. I can turn a piece of steel on my little lathe and leave it a week and no corrosion. My plane is happy and so is everything else.
You HAD to show me that, right?
I thought you might be interested!!
Where I live it’s simply not possible to build such a hangar. … And nobody in my family wants to move to a place where it is, which i can understand of course. But maybe one day …
terbang wrote:
@STOLman has it
Hm, yes indeed, but IF and only IF
-) one can gain building permit – I understand this is a big NO in the more thickly inhabited parts of Europe – it certainly is where I live, and @Flyer59 seems to have similar issues if I read him allright
-) budget constraints can be met – as nice as our fellow’s construction may be, the price ticket must be hefty, even if not counting the cost of labour.
All of which goes to read as “envy” “envy” “ENVY”
