Marquee heating information
Nearly all professional marquee hirers use diesel or gas powered heaters. When using one of these to heat a marquee personally I would always put a carbon monoxide tester in the marquee too. They’re cheap, easy to fit and give peace of mind to both you and the customer. Not only that it makes you look (even more) thorough and professional. All fumes from a diesel heater should be kept outside from the chimney but what if the wind blows it straight back towards the marquee?
L B Whites have a very useful heating app that’s worth looking at and illustrates why electric heaters are just not man enough for any serious size marquee.
Inputting a 6x12m commercial (3m apex height) marquee with a rise of 30degrees C (they do metric, I can’t!) gives a requirement for approx 100,000BTU’s or 30KW of heating. Had we designed our marquees to have a higher apex not only would they be less wind resistant they would also require far more heating – the requirement goes up to 40KW.
The maximum an electric heater can supply is 3KW of heat. If you wanted to heat one of these marquees using electric heaters you would need a whopping 10-13 of them and a very large generator to power them all!
Stick to diesel (indirect) or gas (lbwhite) and fit a carbon monoxide detector.
Thanks for reading
Spencer
