Any Reccomendations on Garage Heaters?

Was thinking about what to install in the hanger, it's about 1800 sq ft, and we're insulating it now. With have R13, so that should help. Never gets too much below 40 degrees and I'd like to keep it about 55 degrees.

Art

 

I recently put an electric Dimplex 13,000btu heater in my garage (3 car) and its MORE than adaquate! Last week it was 28deg out and it got too warm. Now, I havent' seen an electric bill yet so....

http://www.heatersplus.com/dgwh4031.htm

JIM

 

My garage is 1100 sq ft with 9ft ceilings detached and the 75K BTU unit heater will take it from 50 to 65 degrees in 5 or ten minutes. If it is attached to a heated structure you could get by with less. IE:a garage attached to a house. Also would need to know things like how often the doors are opened in the winter? Do you want to heat 24/7 or just when you go out to work? Also available utilities to decide what would be the best. Heat pump is great if you heat all the time and don't open doors much. If you open the doors and let a lot of the heat out your emergency back up heat will come on and use a ton of electric. Same if you have it set low and decide you want to bump it up 15 degrees to go out and work for a couple hours.

 

According to the website that thing is pulling 4000 watts (4 KWH). You could see a real whopper of a bill if that thing runs very often

My aunt had electric resistant baseboard heaters in a back room addition, 18 by 24 feet, 8 inch stud walls, foot and a half of attic insulation, high e glass windows, yada yada. Her daughter moved in there and started running them through the winter months, even after being told not to do so. With the regular monthly budget amount on the bill, the actual charges went unnoticed until spring when they readjusted. Can you say $400 a month additional? And that was keeping it below 70 degrees.

Maybe electric rates are cheaper other places and with milder climates maybe its not as big an issue, but up here the stuff will bury you trying to heat with it.

 

Love my Hot Dawg

http://hot-dawg.modine.com/

Electric start so no pilot so no worries about going boom under normal circumstance. While NOT explosion proof it is garage safe. I make sure it does not light up by setting down the thermostat if I am going to do some spray painting.

Not too expensive, easy to install (if you have gas out there) and set it at 50 and forget it, when you go out bump up the temp.

 

If budget is a concern often you can find a used mobile home funance for under $100. They come in oil, propane and NA versions, just put it in the corner and let it blow into the room. I've known a few people who've done it this why and were very happy with the result.

I like Verell's heat pump suggestion too becasue that gets you AC as well as heat.

 

Just finished insulating my garage to R-19 and installing recessed florescent troffer lights, PITA doing the 12 foot ceilings. Im going to wait until spring to bring in a crew to rock, tape, mud, texture as I refuse to do this any longer.

Due to the cost of heating with LPG I have decided to use the 2 stage Radiant tube heater as it is so much more efficent. I fought the urge to continue the house radiant floor heat into the garage as I would then have to heat it full time due to the slow recovery of heating the entire slab.

According to my calculations the extra initial cost of the Radiant Tube heater will pay back in 2 1/2 years if used as I antisipate (mountain foothills of Colorado) in this climate. I needed the 12' ceilings for the 2 post hoist and heating with an overhead unit type will put all the heat on the ceiling not on the floor where I want it. Getting picky at this age as I want warm feet and exceptional lighting when I am working at home. Kris says she wants some of our own cars finished, go figure.

Dave

 

I had planned on using the downdraft furnace and putting it in the loft and vent down to the floor. Last winter I bought two used units off Craigslist all to find both had cracked manifolds. Researched it a bit more and I then learned the heater boxes in these run much hotter than a normal updraft type and are prone to cracking due to this. My loss as the money went from the wallet to the dumpster followed by a difficult conversation with Kris.

I too like Verell's suggestion if one is in the right climate. I have to rely on a window unit A/C for the summer.

Dave

 

I thought about putting something in the attic to conserve money and floor space. Most home type heating units are designed to be installed in conditioned space meaning I would have had to heat my attic too. They said I would have problems with condensation if I put it in the attic. Not sure if you were going to heat your loft space or not?

 

If you are really worried about explosion/fire the unit heaters can be bought in a SC model( Separated Combustion ) for a couple hundred more. Cold air is brought in from the outside through a separate vent so the flame is sealed inside the unit. Someone told me this was code in some jurisdictions for garages?

 

Thanks for starting this thread, soon I too shall be warm while playing with the big toys in the garage. Took Verrells idea & link:
http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/w...7961_200307961
It'll be here Thursday, I already filled the 100# propane tank and the insulating company has been called, pics to follow.
Can't wait to be warm
Bill

 

Dave,
Thats a type I'm not familiar with.

Which brand/model did you select, & about how much do they cost?

I take it that 2 stage refers to two burner output levels?
What is the thermal efficiency rating?
Do they also have a condensing heat exchanger?

 

I put one of these Dayton units up. My garage has 12' Ceilings and is about 400sqft and it does a great job. I flick the breaker on and in 5 min the place is getting warm. I only use it when I am in there working. It is also pretty quite. This is the cheapest place I found and shipped for free.

http://www.air-n-water.com/product/G73.html
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http://www.reverberray.com/products/res.html

Cost is in the $1K range plus plumbing. After a long discussion with a salesman that was on his game, he talked me out of the more expensive two stage unit for home use. If my plan was to keep the garage heated all the time that unit would have advantages. My plan is mostly on the weekends and an occational evening and not for long periods so the advantages of a unit that has fast recovery and then a low level for maintaining a given temp is overkill. I have experiance with the industrial sized units which are high intensity 4" but this will be my first go around with the residential 3", low intensity type. As my garage space is only 1000 sq. feet I expect the results to be much the same. The last consideration I had was the humidity here averages just above single digits in the winter and having hot air blowing around only lowers that further. A little too dry for my taste.
As a kid, the Minnesota winters frost bit all my fingers and toes so I need to have the floor warm to be comfortable which the radiant heaters do very nicely. In a shop setting with the radiant heaters installed I have found that we keep the T-Stat set around 50 which is very comfortable yet with the unit heaters it seems it requires a 60-65 degree setting. The advantage is the slab and the car / tools is heated which then radiates to heat the air from the floor up, not the reverse that the unit heaters do. This gives a very fast recovery to a comfortable temp when a door has been opened.
Advertised fuel cost savings are 35-50% but in pratical experiance I have seen 30-35% on a regular basis using the single stage units. As we are in the foothills we are on LPG so any fuel efficent units pay back very quickly. Side wall venting and exhaust makes this unit an easy install, not having to tear up a new roof in the middle of the winte to install an exhaust stack. Clearance to combustables is about the only real concern with these and my hoist is set back far enough that I have a good 7' to the car when it is raised.
The new shop building will get the two stage units as in that setting I can take advantage of the design.

When all is said and done and the unit is delivered it appears Grainger's price is with in 5-7% of everyone elses cost.

Dave

 

this is what i use:

http://www.eheat.com/

i have been using these for 3 years, its a cheap way of heating your garage up, i have them on timers and they are relatively safe for small garages( oversized 2 car garage) i have 2 units, and i really haven't noticed an increase in my elecrtic bill.

 

They took me 10min each to install, they are great especially in the cold NJ winters. the only reason i have them on a timer is because i don't live in NJ full time, i go back and forth to FLA but when i am in NJ and the cars are with me i leave them 24/7 for weeks & months at a time without any issues whatsoever. They plug into a regular outlet and if you have white walls in your garage you can't even notice they are there at all. The way i did it, is i started with 1 unit but it wasn't quite the temperature i wanted so i went ahead and ordered a second one and that was perfect, i recommend doing the same until you are happy and they are cheap enough! let me know if you have anymore questions, i would be glad to help.

Good Luck.

 

I saw that on their web site, BUT 35% - 50% compared to what?

It's frustrating that they don't use the industry standard specification of thermal efficiency (ie; Heat output/Chemical energy of input fuel).

The Ceiling mount hot air blowing heaters are 82% - 83% thermally efficient. While I don't like the idea of loosing 18% or so of the heat from my expensive propane out the vent, I don't see how one of these reverberay IR units could save 35% to 50% over one of them as at best there's around 18% to be saved.

I do like IR heat tho. I use a pair of unvented propane ceramic element IR heaters. Their thermal efficiency is nearly 100%! The only heat loss is due to the air needed to keep them fed with O2. All heat from the burning fuel stays inside the garage. However, i'm using jury rigged mounts on top of 100lb propane tanks. 100lb tanks is an expensive way to buy propane. $95/refill! Also the combustion products end up inside the garage. So am looking to replace them with another IR system that I can have hooked up to the house propane system.

 

No arguement here, the sales lines are just that. We are currently using a construction mushroom type until all the parts are in. I would stick with it if it wasnt for the fumes, the open flame is at the floor level and the 30# tank is a PITA. With everything now insulated it only has to run for 15 mins and its quite comfortable out there. My son Bill is pulling the TR3 engine to freshen and install the Judson and I am in the middle of building the 308 engine and sorting the IMSA, lots going on and if I dont get the heater hung quickly the garage will be full again.

I am certain that a good bit of the pitched "reduced operating cost" figure is due to the fact the heat stays on the floor so the T Stat is always set quite a bit lower with this type of unit. We did see sizeable reductions in the shop heating costs back in Mn. when we installed one and only used the overhead unit for fast recovery when the door was opened. When hooked to the house propane and the costs with that these days any advantage will pay back quite quickly. When we built the house two years agao we installed radiant floor heat throughout and way over insulated the house with the new high density packed cellulose. Conpared to my neighbors heating costs in houses 1/2 this size the extra investment will pay back in 7 years and there nothing like warm feet in the winter!

Dave

 

Deric- how warm is it staying in your garage with both of them running? Right now I just have a small oil filled electric radiator in mine. The garage and garage door are well insulated and it keeps it warm enough to work out there with the door closed but by no means balmy. These electric units look like a cheap solution but do they put out much heat?

 

WOW! Thats like $4.75 a gallon, and I thought $1.45 was bad. Some of you guys must have milder climates, I would have gone broke paying that to heat the garage.

I was heating the garage at the other place with one of those kerosene torpedo heaters. What a nasty thing. Bad bad bad. My cieling heater isnt the most efficient one around, but the garage is insulated well enough its okay for now. Last winter I probably used about 600 gallons of LP, but the house backup uses fuel too when the heat pump cant keep up. Now its all converted to nat. gas, so the costs should be about 1/3, to 1/2 what they were. Were also running a air to air heat exchanger on the main furnace, and its just exhausting the waste heat directly outside. I have thought of rerouting the exhaust into the garage to boost efficiency and add pressure to the garage to keep it from sucking in cold outside air to feed the furnace.

 

Hi Guys - I just want to pipe in here on a general comment on electric heaters. The first law of Thermodynamics is that Energy can't be created or destroyed. This means if you have a heater rated at 1500 watts (for example), you can only create 1500 watts of heat/temperature increase. Otherwise, you'd somehow be creating heat from thin air, which is not possible. So you can largely forget about a certain electric heater of the same power rating being more efficient than another of the same rating at actually heating the air. A minor exception is that one heater may produce more light than another and be a little less efficient at making heat. IE, the more visible light a heater makes (from glowing elements), the less heat it will make. Light will just dissipate (go wherever the other light that continues to enter the room through windows, etc. also goes).

Now don't get me wrong... an infrared (IR) electric heater will produce more IR energy, and the nice thing is that you can DIRECT it where you want to shine the IR, and that can make the "target" get much warmer directly. But if you measure the air temp, it still will not heat the air any more than a plain electric heater will. Of course, heat pumps are a different animal... they pump heat in from outside air, so don't make heat, they transfer heat into the room, and are much more efficient than other forms of electric heating (as long as it doesn't get too cold outside!).

So any electric heater of a given rating will not raise the air temp in the room any more than any other electric heater, regardless of the type of electric heater. As I said, IR heaters can heat up a specific spot more, though. Those are just the facts of physics, and I wanted to mention this so people don't start spending lots of extra $ on heaters claiming to be more efficient, instead of on their cars or garages!

Rick

 

Most of the time the money is in the second law. Electric heat is 100% efficient, but also normally the most expensive. The reason is that electricity is orderly energy vs fuel which is chemical energy. The very best you can do making electricity in a fuel burning process is 66% efficient and then there are delivery losses with the average being 30% to your door.

Now going back to first law stuff, and 80% efficient fuel burning heater is in truth 2.66 time more efficient than a 100% efficient resistive electric heater.

As for radiant heaters being 35% more efficient than other types, clearly that would be a lie which is why there are no units of any kind on the website that implies it to be true. The truth is that they probably do save you money when you run them as temporary heat in a space with larger thermal masses like a shop. Dave mentioned the reason in an earlier post, if you can get the floor warm, you will feel warmer in a colder room. Radiant heat heats the floor quickly if it’s pointed at the floor so you feel warm.

Heat losses are primarily not through the floor though as the soil below the floor will be 50+ degrees all the time. The main losses will be out the windows, doors, roof and walls that are exposed to the cold air outside and the warmer the air is in the room the faster the heat leaks out. Hot air heaters pump the air in at 90 or 100F, it rises quickly, faster than it can diffuse into the cold room air and leaks out the roof…..so you save money running the radiant heater.

Now, everything I just talked about is really a transient condition. If you don’t shut the heat off at night, and allow it to come to a steady state condition the floor and other thermal masses will warm up nicely and drop out of the equation. Then what will save you money is a more efficient heater. In moderate climates a heat pump is the cheapest to run because they use their energy to move heat not make heat. The main complaint is the air that come out of them is not as warm as a fuel burning heater and feels cold and drafty. The next best is a condensing gas furnace which work much better with NG than LP due to the much NG combustion producing so much more water than LP combustion.

 

I'm in MD and just got the 150 Gal tank delivered. I have a 100# for sale cheap with new regulator if anyone needs one. About two years old, some gas. PM me if interested.
Used it to run my 75K BTU unit heater. Bought new Reznor Unit heater w/propane kit delivered for around $700 from Dennis Company, Iowa. Great people to deal with.