best way to control fan?

[iowaowb]

I have a woodmaster 5500 Heats house, dhw, and garage. This fall we built a 30 x 56 pole building. I have pump for building and the pex buried and bought a heat exchanger for building I also have a squirrel cage fan out of a old furnace. I need a way to control the motor on the fan. I did the same thing in our garage and used a plug in controller (thermostat) for space heaters from farm store. Looked the other day and they are now $75 dollars almost double the one for garage. However I would like to have the thermostat farther away from heat source than that system. Does anybody have any ideas?

 

[brisawyer]

Use a house thermostat and scrounge the blower contactor out of an old furnace.

 

[Iska3]

Use a house thermostat and scrounge the blower contactor out of an old furnace.

:agree2:

Thanks to the great members on this site who came up with the idea, I picked up two used forced air furnaces on CL for free. Took out the guts, put in my HW exchanger connected the contactor to the blower and a cheap thermostat on eBay and heat the house and the garage. Check with your local plumbers, most have scrap furnaces right now and you can have the parts for next to nothing.

Happy Thanksgiving​

 

[Butch(OH)]

I have about the same setup in my shop except I used a truck radiator. I used a line voltage thermostat to contol the fan. Cant remember the cost but was a whole lot cheaper than $75. They are comonly used to control electric baseboard heaters and areavailable at any Home Cheapo type store. The temp control will be a little coarser than a regular thermostat but much better than those farm store ones made for space heaters, at least the one I have.

 

[magnumhntr]

If you only have the fan, you can build a box to put the HX in and mount the fan to the box. Home Depot sells 'line voltage' thermostats for about $20, and a plug with 10-12' of 14/2 for less than $10.....

 

[Biker Dude]

I just used a fan center wired to a double outlet which controls my circulator pump and box fan at the same time triggered by a generic 28v thermostat.
$32 fan center brand new