Topic: Garage heater?

[heffay]

hey... i found this on craigslist for 20 bucks and i'm going to pick it up this evening.

anyone have experience with similar items?  bobbyr?  you said you have 2 kerosene heaters.  also, how much of an open flame will this make?... i plan on doing carb work tomorrow and i'd like to be able to continue to post here 

[ProTeal55]

You folks are making me very envious. Here I am trying to get by with a single 15A circuit.. unless it's shared with something in the house.  

Don't feel bad ,I am right their with ya on the single 15A circuit.
I got two of those heaters like Sparty has, and can only run them at the lower power level (combined load of 12amps), and then if I need to use a tool or something I have to unplug. Plus with the new Com-Ed rate increase, It looks like the old propane "garbage can" heater is my best option...

[BobbyR]

Not a problem Heff. First put a 1/8 tank full of kero in it and give it 1/2 hour to dully soak the wick. If it is a very still day, light it outside and let it burn dry. If it is breezy, put it in the garage with the door open. This will clean off the wick. Now you are ready to heat. Fill that bad boy up and light it outside. You should see a even flame around the spreader plate. Now you can bring it indoors. When you are ready to turn ot off, take it outside. The majority of fumes are generated while the flame is stabilizing and when you snuff the flame. You will be at more risk from the carb cleaner than the Kero heater. In Japan most people heat with them and they live longer than we do.

[Dave K]

As with any fossil fuel ventless heater, it is strongly advised not to sleep with one that is on, because you make wake up dead. Once in a hunting camp, one was used and I had a headache that nothing would cure but fresh air over a long period. Since carbon monoxide builds up in the blood stream and must be purged with long periods of clean air.

[kuyarico]

My parents bought a kerosene heater about 25 years ago for use in an emergency. It's never been used. I shall make it mine. Actually, it's been relatively warm here in Cleveland. I only had to use my space heater a few times. So I may hold off on using the kerosene unless the temps start to drop again.

[heffay]

thanks guys... i'll be sure to open the 2car garage door every now and again to replace the air.

after my weatherproofing hospital debacle last spring i try to watch my bad chemical intake a little more strictly.  i was using weatherproofing spray on my riding pants in my 375 square foot cabin... needless to say, i ended up in the e.r. 

the common sense eluded me that day!  but, in my defense... i didn't think i sprayed that much and it snuck up on me.  the doctor said that it happens most often with weatherproofing spray because of the silicone... seems lungs don't like it.  but, on a good note... in the long run he said it would do far less damage than paints and other types of sprays.

[BobbyR]

Heff, we stand a better chance of winding up in the ER from our bikes than a Kero Heater. Now I know I should wear a good mask when waterproofing my chimney.

[TomC]

Hi Those of us needing to heat our garages
     CO meters or alarms are relatively cheap and easy to find these days. And as some members of this group recommend that I go out and spend money I thought I would return the favor.
          TomC

[Saddlewarmer]

i have used a good sealed wood stove in my shops for years. love it. gotta have a good stove tho, and some kind of ventilation for fresh air.

[medic09]

Not a problem Heff. First put a 1/8 tank full of kero in it and give it 1/2 hour to dully soak the wick. If it is a very still day, light it outside and let it burn dry. If it is breezy, put it in the garage with the door open. This will clean off the wick. Now you are ready to heat. Fill that bad boy up and light it outside. You should see a even flame around the spreader plate. Now you can bring it indoors. When you are ready to turn ot off, take it outside. The majority of fumes are generated while the flame is stabilizing and when you snuff the flame. You will be at more risk from the carb cleaner than the Kero heater. In Japan most people heat with them and they live longer than we do.

I think Bobby's got it right.  In Israel, these were very common ('neft' heaters) when I was a young man.  Old stone buildings with no central heat.  They work well.  Try putting a pan of water nearby (on the older designs we'd rest it right on top) for humidifying.  The newer designs can really impress you with how they heat a room.  Keep a window just slightly cracked for ventilation.

[Rocking-M]

I have an outside wood furnice, water furnice. It heats the house and the unattached shop when I need it.
I just have to finish insulating my shop. Its 44 by 40 so it's taking a while

[750K4]

I spent several years heating my 24x30 garage/shop with kerosene, electric, etc. The problem was when I wanted to work on something in the shop during our notoriously cold Iowa winters, after turning on the heater, everything in the shop would be wet with condensation. I started adding up the cost of all my tools, cars, motorcycles, etc., and I realized that I wasn't protecting all this stuff as well as I thought (by keeping it indoors) because I was causing it to get wet every time I fired up the heater. Tools and other steel stuff rusts when wet, and I couldn'y stand the thought of all my "toys" slowly rusting away IN THE GARAGE I BUILT TO PROTECT THEM! The solution is to keep the building just warm enough to stay above the dew point with a thermostatically-controlled heater, and then warm it the rest of the way up to a comfortable temp when I want to work out there in shirtsleeves. I chose a natural gas hanging heater specifically designed to heat a garage. They come in lp/propane versions as well with a simple internal change. Mine is a Reznor brand 35,000 BTU model. There are many others. It was more expensive than some of the other methods discussed here at $375, plus I paid a plumber to run the gas line, and I had to buy about $25 worth of vent pipe to put through the roof. I hand dug a trench out to the shop and had a plumber run the line and cap it close to the heater. I then used a clothes dryer connection in flexible conduit to connect the heater to the gas supply. It took me about a day to hook everything up, and boy does it work nice. I set the thermostat at 50 degrees F and it runs sparingly. I insulated the side walls and blew in about a foot of insulation in the attic. This may be more $$$ than some will want to spend, but what is the value of what are you trying to protect by storing it inside? You may be doing long-term damage to it, and a heater solution that prevents moisture from forming may be a better overall method vs a cheap and easy solution.

One very important point I'd like to make:
Do NOT use an open flame heater of ANY KIND around solvents or gasoline. And every one of you using a kerosene or propane heater know you are! Fumes from solvents and gasoline are heavier than air, and tend to pool near the floor. If you have an open flame heater sitting on the floor, sooner or later some fumes will get to the flame and ignite. BOOM! Not a good thing. If you're going to use one of these, for God's sake get it off the floor. Set it on a table, suspend it from the ceiling, etc. 5-6 feet off the floor if you can. I have a friend who was severely burnt when an oil heater ignited fumes from his Corvette's fuel tank as he was repairing the sending unit. It covered him in flames, and the explosion lifted his two-car garage off its foundation and dropped it back down five feet away. Never would have happened if he had placed the heater off the floor. Don't let this happen to you.

One more tidbit from my experiences:
Tack a sheet of plastic to the rafters above your head if your building is open up to the roof. $10 worth of plastic sheeting carefully tacked and overlapped to provide a barrier will make an amazing difference in a heater's ability to keep a room warm. I taped the seams to make for an airtight barrier. Probably the best bang-for-the-buck when heating an outbuilding.

[Bob Wessner]

K4,

I currently use a propane torpedo heater when working in the winter. All the condensation problems you mentioned have always bothered me as well. I've though about longer-term, better solutions. Thanks for taking the time to document yours.

[heffay]

i understand what you're saying K4 and hopefully someday i'll have an extra few hundred dollars laying around and a garage that is my own that i can pimp out in the safest of ways.  for now though, 20 bucks was not gonna get beat for a heater.  the heater i picked up last night works great and is much bigger than i'd hoped.  it stands about 2 or 2 1/2 feet tall.  i'll set it up off the ground a ways but, i'm not gonna plastic my ceiling 'cuz all my girls are up there 
anyway, i'm going out there now to go change the oil and induce rust on my motorcycles   

[BobbyR]

One very important point I'd like to make:
Do NOT use an open flame heater of ANY KIND around solvents or gasoline. And every one of you using a kerosene or propane heater know you are! Fumes from solvents and gasoline are heavier than air, and tend to pool near the floor. If you have an open flame heater sitting on the floor, sooner or later some fumes will get to the flame and ignite. BOOM! Not a good thing. If you're going to use one of these, for God's sake get it off the floor. Set it on a table, suspend it from the ceiling, etc. 5-6 feet off the floor if you can. I have a friend who was severely burnt when an oil heater ignited fumes from his Corvette's fuel tank as he was repairing the sending unit. It covered him in flames, and the explosion lifted his two-car garage off its foundation and dropped it back down five feet away. Never would have happened if he had placed the heater off the floor. Don't let this happen to you.

One more tidbit from my experiences:
Tack a sheet of plastic to the rafters above your head if your building is open up to the roof. $10 worth of plastic sheeting carefully tacked and overlapped to provide a barrier will make an amazing difference in a heater's ability to keep a room warm. I taped the seams to make for an airtight barrier. Probably the best bang-for-the-buck when heating an outbuilding.

You are correct. Any open flame or electric heater will ignite fumes and that is very good advice. I get more condensation in the summer than the winter since  my AC cools the garage. When I take the bike outside it looks frosted. One problem when running a bike in the winter is having it cool down in an unheated space, you will get condensation both inside and out.

[Dave K]

750K4, one of the nails you hit on condensation is the fact that you are running a vented heater/furnace. State code here in Ohio is that the flame type of heaters, be a miniumum of 18" above the floor to prevent the igniting of other combustible gases or fumes. I am going from memory on the 18", of you are in Ohio, but do check it out. The pilot light in my well insulated work 24'x30' work shop will keep it near 40º in the coldest of weather. It takes no time to get it to shirt sleeve temps.

[Cowboy]

I've been heating with a wood stove, but my garage is large, and the wood stove is only good if you're working near it. I did my carb rebuild sitting on a stool about two feet away from the wood stove. I was comfortable enough,  though the rest of the garage was about 20 degrees F. It helps a lot to place metal tools on the top of the wood stove to warm them. Warm tools are NICE for keeping fingers warm!

Over the past couple weeks, I've added two passive solar heat collectors to my garage. My garage doors face south, and occupy nearly all of the south-facing wall. I built a simple solar hot air box 3' x 6' and about ten inches deep. It sits in the only portion of the south wall that is not occupied by the doors. It is a typical thermo-siphon setup, that draws cool air in the bottom, and as the air heats it rises out the top naturally, by convection. This type of setup will siphon backward at night and chill the space unless you cover the openings after the sun goes down. (They can be designed to avoid the backward siphon, but they don't create as much heat that way when the sun is shining. See the first link, below.)

I also built a very large, 8 x 9 foot collector that stands in front of one of my two overhead doors. It fills the opening entirely, and creates about an eight inch air space between the clear Polycarbonate (Suntuf) panels and the metal door. I can either open the door about eight inches, in which case it will thermo-siphon like the smaller collector, or I can open the door completely, and let the sun shine onto the floor to heat the concrete. When I finish the project, this collector panel will be mounted on a track, so you can still open the garage door to get cars in and out. For now, the door is blocked by the collector.

I still need to finish insulating the garage before I can comment on how well the systems work. I can tell you that the sunroom in my house, which has south-facing windows right next to the garage works all too well. On a sunny winter day, it can get too hot in the sunroom, so we turn on a fan to push the warm air into the rest of the house. I hope the garage system works as well. The garage will have about the same amount of glass area as the sunroom, but four times the volume, so I don't expect it to function quite so well. But it doesn't really need to. The idea was to let the sun heat the garage through the day, so when I get home in the evening, I can work out there comfortably for a few hours.  Having lived in Wyoming all my life, I can take a lot of cold. I just want a system that takes the chill off in the evening, without costing an arm and a leg. I find that it is difficult to take the chill off using just the wood stove. By the time the space gets warm, it's past bedtime.

Oh, I also love the idea of simple, clean, free heat from the sun. If anyone is interested, I could snap some pics.

Here are links to a couple articles on similar projects that gave me my inspiration:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/1977_September_October/Mother_s__Heat_Grabber_

http://289ewww.motherearthnews.com/Alternative_Energy/2006-12-01/Build-a-Simple-Solar-Heater