Car radiator inlet/outlet connections

[truckmech]

Try a radiator off a big truck. They are heavy duty and most have bolt on flanges {2 bolt} for the inlet and outlet. You could easily weld up a pipe fitting to a flat piece of steel. There are big truck junk yards. This would also give you more heat. Also many will have support brackets that you can hang it with.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Was looking into that actually, but they are not cheap, around $900 or so. The car ones are around $100 give or take, even pickup truck ones arn't too bad. I'll probably get two pickup truck ones, think it will be good. Or if I run across one of those old style cast iron radiators I might do that for the garage part. The cast iron will hold in the heat better. I could even make my own out of copper pipe, though at that point the car radiator is probably going to be more effective.

I'm not close to the point of doing this project yet so gives me lot of time to think anyway. I will put in baseboard heaters either way to try to maintain around 5C so I don't get frost heave breaking the new concrete (still waiting on that). If I see that it's actually not using that much power I might even just stick to that. The hvac system will require the shop to be semi operational for me to have a place to build it so I'll need heat either way.