Learn me: cheaper garage heating

I just bought a new house. Has a nice 20'x20' double car garage (read: a single car garage with lots of room.) my current problem is that it has been so cold here I have little motivation to go wrench, or I'll freeze my nads off. It's been single digits here with a high in the mid 30's for weeks now. I just today bought a little propane mr. Heater unit. But is there a better option? Garage is attached to house but not by a man door. And no ventilation, so the mr heater can't be on long. So, with tons of house projects going on, suggestions would need to to be cheap and simple. The idea here is to get motivation to wrench, not spend more time and money.

You've got cheap and simple with the buddy heater.

Can you add a small pellet or wood stove without losing your homeowners insurance? Lots of shops up here use them, including my old rental with a garage. Just be careful with flammables.

Carhartt overalls. Seriously.

If you have the electrical supply available and can afford the utility bill a couple of big baseboard heaters is probably the cheapest and easiest option.

In my experience the next cheapest and easiest option is a used forced air whole house furnace mounted in the corner with a single supply or return duct up in the rafters to the opposite side of the space. Add a 100# propane tank outside opposite the furnace and you will easily warm up any work space fast.

An LP furnace out of a mobile home can be had off of Craig$list for $100-150. A simple hole in the wall to run the exhaust and a leased propane tank from a local supplier and you will never be cold again. You should be able to find those furnaces close by.

We bought one of those in-window heat pump things to heat our bedroom with, after years of farting around with space heaters and whatnot. It was about $400, but in my op-inion was money well spent. We set the thermostat on it, and it keeps the bedroom at a perfect temperature. The space heaters never did that- and they sucked up a ton of juice while failing, as well.

Here's the unit we bought

You may need a larger unit for 400 sq feet of garage, but then again, you may not- we keep our bedroom at 67 degrees, and it's fairly large, about 300 square feet. That heat pump has no trouble keeping up, even with the bedroom door open (and the rest of our upstairs is freezing, since its undergoing renovation). You probably only need to keep the garage around 55 or 60 to be comfortable working in it.

Beware cheaper in-window units with heat. Many of them just use heat strips, which isn't any better than a space heater. The heat pump is way more efficient, so you get more BTU's per watt of energy burned.

Bonus with this setup: you get A/C in the summer. Such opulence!

Well. Now I want that but it's $400. Thanks a lot. I think it will even fit my tiny windows.

I stopped using my portable propane haeter due to the fumes. I just got one of these recently: IR heater

Seems to work well so far, but the coldest the garage has been is mid 40s (so far).

(edit to add picture)

I built a waste oil heater out of an old water heater. It will get up to about 400F on waste oil. My shop is >1200 sq ft. We'll see how it does this winter. It takes about 15 minutes to come up to operating temp and to "turn off." A wood stove takes about 1-2 hours to come up to temp and half a day to turn off.

If you're into building stuff, Google "waste oil heater." They supposedly burn so hot that there's no smoke or smell. Doing something useful with old engine oil seems like a win/win.

[edit] Bah, der Doctor beat me to it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XY7laL_yOsM

RedGT wrote: Well. Now I want that but it's $400. Thanks a lot. I think it will even fit my tiny windows.

That's why we got it- it was the smallest heat pump we could find that a) was a true heat pump, and b) fit our tiny old windows. It also runs off normal 110VAC. Spend the monies. Uncle Sam will be giving you a bunch soon, anyway.

In reply to volvoclearinghouse: The real problem is the floor.. heat rises so the floor is always cold.. IR heaters solve that. They heat up the floor and anything you touch. In return they yield that heat up into the room so you feel warm. Short of tearing up the concrete to put in floor radiant heat IR heaters make working in the winter tolerable.

Halogen work lights. I know LED and fluorescent are popular for their energy efficiency but 500 watt halogens are crazy bright (nice to see what you're doing) and radiate a lot of heat. Throw on the aforementioned Carharts and I suspect you'll find the garage is plenty warm in 15 minutes.

I use a 4000 watt 240V heater from Northern Tool. It gets my 12x28 attached garage warmer than my house, despite the poorly sealed garage door, drafty man door and a window that doesn't completely close. It's nice because it doesn't take up much room and is easily stored away when not in use.

My concern with waste oil heaters is the amount of oil needed to heat a space for a given time, where to get that oil (even with 3-4 running cars, I only generate a few gallons of used oil each year) and where to store it until needed.

I bought a plastic barrel from a neighbor for ten or fifteen bucks. It looks to originally had car-wash soap in it. I got a barrel pump from Sportsmans Guide for about fifteen. I put my waste oil in there. I also hit my friends up for their waste oil. I have >20 gallons right now, and it might burn between a half gallon and a gallon a day, so that should give me close to 30 days worth of heat, or 15 weekends, which should be fine for the winter.

I start it on #2 Diesel. A lot cheaper than kerosene.

KyAllroad wrote: Halogen work lights. I know LED and fluorescent are popular for their energy efficiency but 500 watt halogens are crazy bright (nice to see what you're doing) and radiate a lot of heat. Throw on the aforementioned Carharts and I suspect you'll find the garage is plenty warm in 15 minutes.

This, too. I have a 500W ceiling mounted in the garage and two 250W on portable stands. Point it at what you're working at.

In summer I switch to the flourescents.

I had an old Franklin wood stove back in Pa....

We had a waste oil heater at our shop, worked great. Let's you reuse oil from the vehicles and once the news gets out, your neighbors are happy to help you fuel your garage instead of taking their oil all the way back for recycling.

Is the garage insulated? Can you partition off your "work area of the day" to reduce the total area needing heat (I considered hanging tarps like shower curtains to encircle my bench and car areas separately so I wouldn't have to heat the 2nd bay - a friend built framed plastic poly walls he could move around). I use propane heat to warm the garage above freezing but shut the heat off when I start working,and wear insulated coveralls and old carpets when lying on the concrete.

Check the low temperature cut off for the heat pump. It gets too cold for most of those to work here in Wisconsin.

I just wired up an outlet for the same type of heater IanF has. Seems pretty darn effective so far, though I'm still futzing with the shop rather than wrenching, and I'm only testing it into the thirties here in OR... Doesn't do anything for the floor, so I usually switch to warm boots when it's been cold.

I've heard you can make an old oil furnace burn waste oil OK with just a preheater right before the pump to bring the oil up to 200* or so to thin it out. Old upright units can be had for next to nothing, install easy enough (flue with draft regulator, 15 amp circuit, a couple ducts) and you can always just run it on diesel with the preheater off. Forced air will take up less space than a radiant heater, since you need a safety zone cleared around a woodstove or waste oil drum heater.

If you have the power for it, as mentioned, a rack or two of twin 500W halogens will really warm you up though.

For occasional use it's hard to beat an electric unit heater. They're relatively inexpensive to buy and install, and heat the space up quickly. They do cost more to run on a per unit basis (generally) but if you're only using it for few hours here and there it's not that big a deal.

frenchyd wrote: In reply to volvoclearinghouse: The real problem is the floor.. heat rises so the floor is always cold.. IR heaters solve that. They heat up the floor and anything you touch. In return they yield that heat up into the room so you feel warm. Short of tearing up the concrete to put in floor radiant heat IR heaters make working in the winter tolerable.

Laying on a piece of cardboard works well to insulate you from the cold concrete floor.

+1 for insulation. My garage has no actual heat source (although it is underneath the house) with R30 ceiling and R19 walls, and R19 insulated doors, and it's half earth sheltered, but the lowest temp I've seen in 17 winters is 39 degrees, and that was after three straight nights of -25. If you use it as a garage, i.e. pull a running-temperature car into it regularly, the engine heat should keep it in the 50s. But insulation will make any heat source work infinitely better.