Any Reccomendations on Garage Heaters?

How long does it take to heat up the garage to 60 from 30? How much was it to put in the 220 line? Does it have to be vented? Since your a contrator I'm sure this is an easy DIY, but what about the average joe.

Cheers,

 

I have a neighbor who is a stewardess on SouthWest Airlines, every time she comes over the garage really heats up fast.

 

Of course, in my post, I was only talking about heating up the air a certain number of degrees on average with pure electric heat, either simple resistive or infrared. How warm you actually feel is, of course, dependent upon many factors, including how cold the walls are that you are radiating body heat to and how close you stand to the heater.

 

I'd love to see $1.45/gallon propane. I heat my house with propane, have a 500 gallon tank. Last delivery's price was $3.20/gallon, kiss $1k goodby!!!

We have one of the condensing gas furnaces mk e is referring to. I had it installed about 10 years ago. At the time, the heating options were either propane, fuel oil, or a ground water heat pump. At the time, the best oil furnace had about 87-88% thermal efficiency, & the propane had something like 95+%. The furnace's efficiency more than made up for the difference in $/BTU of propane vs oil. I'd have to run the calculations again, fuel oil is running $3.30/gallon around here. I suspect our propane system is still somewhere between a break even to a slight win compared to oil.

You can't call MA a milder climate, at least not by much. In 25F day/15F night weather, once I've got the garage up to temp, the remainder of a 100lb tank will maintain it at about 60F - 65F for about a week. I go thru 3 to 4 100 lb tanks/year. Up until about 3 years ago, I was paying $45/tank, now it's doubled. So you can see why I'm interested in alternative garage heating systems. At a minimum I need to plumb the garage heating into the house's propane, that would be about a 40% saving on garage heating. Hmm, would only take a couple of years to pay back for a new plumbed-in heater.

 

See: http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/propane/index.html

If I believe the DOE, it's world oil prices that are driving the cost of all forms of energy these days. Sure wish those scientists playing around with Fusion would finally get serious & deliver something practical.

I see your point about those with mobile homes, they've gotta be hurting, or maybe freezing. Lots of houses around here were built in the 1920s & 1930s & haven't been properly insulated. Probably walls aren't any better insulated than those mobile homes! I can sympathise with them. When I was growing up, we had to close up half the house for the heating season. Just closed all the doors to that part of the house & stuffed rags into the cracks to seal out drafts!

I'm lucky, my current house was built in 1980 as one of the last 'total electric' homes, so is pretty well insulated for it's age (2x4 studs w/fibreglass bats, then 1" double foil faced foam, & sheathed with 5/8" T111 plywood siding. Doesn't compare to energy efficient new construction of course. We actually got a whopping discount on our electric bill when we first moved in in the mid '80s. The PO had put in a forced hot air wood burning system tho, & I heated with wood for about 10 years. Finally let Cindy talk me into adding a more conventional fuel furnace which is how we ended up with Propane. That wood system was terribly inefficient, so when we started the propane our annual heating expendetures went down. Of course, w/o the exercise of stacking the wood & bringing it in, I got out of shape & began putting on weight...

 

"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?"

I get about 67 Degrees with 2 heater units with approx 39 degrees outside temperature ( i just went downstairs to look at the temp in the garage and it is 39 degrees outside according to weather.com )

It does take about 3 - 4 hours for the garage to heat up when you first turn them on. Also my garage is not very well insulated and there are air leaks everywhere. But i truly recommend these for a cheap solution to getting your garage warmer.

Deric

 

here are some pics, the car was in the way..but you get the gist of it.
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Thanks, nice car in the way btw..... ha

 

thanks and your welcome.

Deric

 

I was watching NASA last night, and this discussion came to mind, and I started wondering how they insulate spacecraft. While in direct sunlight they have temps that can exceed 220F, in the shadows temps can drop to below -300F. If you balanced the two you still end up around -40F as an average. Yet they always seem to have to much heat. Skylab had a problem after it was deployed, a heat shield was torn away durring ascent, and once in orbit temps began to go above normal. They ended up jury rigging a heat shield to get temps back down.

On the space station, both the station itself, as well as the astronauts when outside working, seem to have an overabundance of heat to get rid of. One of the last few missions they installed more ammonia type radiators on the station to shed more heat into space. On the Space Shuttle, the cargo doors are entirely covered inside with these same type of ammonia radiators.

In the 70's when we had that energy crisis, and the Peanut Man decided we needed to conserve energy, many amazing ideas and technologies came up, some absolutely facinating. But some went to far, and were so ugly or over engineered they turned everyone off. Then in the 80's as we seen our economy boom, everyone just forgot about all of it. Nobody builds berm or earth sheltered homes anymore, they are considered cavemanish, or for hippies. Solar collectors fell out of favor for the same reasons. I recall an elementary school that spentover amillion dollars putting in a hot water heat solar collector system, but of course it had to be state of the art. It even tracked the sun with these large parabolic mirrors. Several years later when it stopped working, they just disconnected the whole thing and hooked up to gas. Its still there rotting away, both useless and a total waste of money time and energy. I recall lots of homes that put up solar water heaters on thier roofs, today you dont see any.

But a lot of things have changed. This house here where I live is actually quite amazing. Its large, too large actually, about 4000 SF. But it costs less to heat than any home ive had that was 1/3 its size. Its has 8 inch walls, low e glass windows, and a ton of insulation in the attic. With the heat pump on off peak, and off peak water heaters, if we can keep lights off as much as possible our monthly electric isnt more than $120. While that might seem high, the furnace is a high efficient condensing type, and the gas used is very low. The garage is actually using more fuel than the house by about 2:1. I could probably heat the house when the heat pump wont keep up, with about 100 gallons of propane for the whole year, whereas the garage is sucking up about 300 or so gallons all by itself.

Which begs the question, are we really doing everything we can do to save energy? I havnt ever been a big tree hugger type, but driving past a trailer park in the middle of january and seeing all thier roofs melting off snow at zero F with heat waves radiating into the atmosphere is kind of disturbing. I keep asking how we ever got out of the cave and can be so stupid to live this way. Maybe the cave is where we should have stayed? I dont know, but we are actually trying our damdest to heat the outside. I certainly dont want to see Geodesic dome homes or goofy stuff like that, but we could surely build our homes to be a lot more efficient than they are today. Which goes back to my original question, how do they insulate spacecraft?

 

The problem with spacecraft is how do you get rid of the heat, not how do you keep it. The reason is that on earth there is air and wind and most of the heat loss is by conduction and mass transfer (air exchange) with the radiant heat losses normally small enough simply ignore. In space all you have to work with is radiant cooling and you have to make it work with only a 300F temperature difference...which isn't much to work with and it has to be in the shade or the sun will put heat in instead of letting you dump it.

 

Yeah, I googled "spacecraft insulation" and read about that, its pretty interesting, I should have gone and read before hyperventilating. So all we need to do to be warm is get rid of air. Or live in vacuum thermos bottles.

 

Line up your spacecraft thermal questions, the NASA thermal engineer is on his way over to pull the motor out of his Sportster tonight. I believe the ammonia type radiators you mentioned are ammonia filled heat pipes used to transfer the heat to the radiators. Like mentioned before only way to get rid of heat in space is by radiation since there is no convection or other heat sinks.

I was trying to see if it made sense to get a water cooled heat exchanger for a heatpump and run a closed loop fresh water system to my 1200 gal inground septic tank. Drop a hundred foot coil of pipe in the tank and circulate coolant through closed loop lines to the heat exchanger on the heatpump. The lines would also travel about 100 feet underground from the heatpump to the septic tank. Not sure if 1200 gallons is enough or weather the concrete tank would allow enough transfer to the soil. Also worry about weather the extra heat into the septic would screw up the process of how the waste breaks down or the reverse in the winter when the heat pump would try to cool down the contents of the septic tank. Proably better to do with an inground swimming pool. Heat the pool and cool the house at the same time in the summer.

 

Thanks to this thread I now have a heated garage. The installation took about 4 hours & the heater warmed the garage from 45 to 65 in less than 40 min. Once the insulation is in I expect even better performance. An added bonus is I can move into the garage the next time we have a multi day power outage & sleep in a warm garage with the mistress.
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Is that a 69 Camaro over there with boxes placed properly on top??

 

Looks good, which one did you go with? Did you have to go propane or nat gas?

 

Propane unit running off a 100# tank, will get a bigger tank if needed but I think for my needs it'll work fine. Yes thats a 2 owner (me & the original) 69 Z28 in original paint. I was going to sell it when I bought the 308 but have yet to list it. Read some where its the working mans Ferrari 250GTO so I've held onto it. I try & warm it up quarterly if not monthly but its tough to dig it out of the back of the garage. Who knows, now that its warm in there anything can happen.
Bill

 

Alright, Now that everyone has installed their heat in the garage the next thing you need is one of these openers for a very clean look and clearence for a lift.
http://www.liftmaster.com/consumerweb/pages/productmodeldetail.aspx?modelId=834