Haewyr's Blog

Innovative heating solutions for my garden office

This summer I had a new garden office installed so I could get my home office out of the house, improve my wife's mood and allow me some peace during the school holidays.

Researching it I expected that extremes of temperature might present some problems and this summer's 5 heatwaves proved that to be true. The room is insulated though so even on the hottest days I found I can still get a few hours of use before the temp ticks above 30C signalling time to take my laptop indoors where it is at least a couple degrees cooler.

Now the weather is starting to turn I'm testing the reverse problem, finding it's a little too cold first thing in the morning. I had expected this too and brought my 900w oil heater into the office and expect this to be more than enough for even the coldest days however before then I'm trying a different tack. The office also houses my Threadripper desktop PC which at peak can kick out a couple of hundred watts on its own so I've been putting it to work and within a few minutes the office has been nicely cosy.

I'm now thinking about how long I can keep this up before resorting to the oil heater and even scripting some automation to fire up BOINC or Prime95 when the temperature drops too far. Unit prices being what they are at least I could get some useful work out of the energy used!