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What's heating your garage - Gas or electric?


Indy Dave

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I've moved into a new home and have a 960sf garage. One of the main reasons for buying this casa was the large garage, so yours truly can have room to work on bike/cars.

 

I live in Indiana and want to keep the garage above freezing all winter and warmed up when I'm working out there. Some neighbors have very small electric heaters they say work fine. Installing is the easy part of the electric heater option, but I'm not real sure that's the way to go. Their garages are somewhat smaller and 'work fine' is subjective. I'd been leaning towards power vented gas.

 

What's in your garage and how happy are you?

 

 

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28X28 garage with this heating the parking area. Works really well, I keep it at 40 degrees during the winter months. Warms up to seventy within a half hour.

 

http://www.qcsupply.com/modine-hot-dawg-heater.html?utm_source=googlebase&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=productfeeds&sel=6051&gclid=CPXu9uSJlskCFdcRgQodt5QAkQ

 

I've not tracked propane usage but it's not terrible.

 

 

Pat

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John Ranalletta

Is your garage insulated?

 

I've only got a small shop to heat and used a propane-fed Buddy heater. Not as good as Tewks set up, though.

 

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I'm not sure how our winters compare (we're located in S. Ontario, Canada) but typically we experience 5 to -22 F daytime winter temps w/a stint of about a week approaching -40. Our garage is a combined (wood) work shop and garage having a passage door in the partition between the two. The ceiling is 8' high. It's a stand alone building so all four walls are exposed to the weather as opposed to an attached garage which will have the advantage of a sheltered wall and sharing ambient heat from the house. Ours is about half the size of your garage. It's used only periodically so we tend to idyl the temp at about 40 F to protect freezable paints, job materials etc. that are stored there. This base temp allows for a quick return to 'room temperature' conditions if we plan to spend time there.

 

We heat with a floor model propane heater that has a sealed burner i.e. uses outside air for combustion so that the flame is isolated from any volatile fumes from shop or garage activities. The burner has a mechanical sparker and pilot light. The exhaust is non-powered although there is an electric heated air circulation fan that can be on or off and is variable speed. This set up lets us operate the stove even if the power is down so there's no threat to the stored freezables although on colder days I expect we'd miss the advantage of the circulation fan if power was indeed out - but thinking about it, I don't think we've ever worked there during any power outage (we live in a rural area and can almost expect at least a couple of extended power outages each heating season).

 

With our application the stove we have fits nicely with our needs. I've been in several garages, typically with higher ceilings, that have burners suspended from the ceiling. I've found these garages cool to cold at floor level and cool to hot at head level and that their fans are significantly noisier than the small circulation fan on our floor mounted stove. Perhaps it's not fair to make this comparison because these two scenarios may not be comparable as there is a significant difference in both the volume of air to heat and perhaps a demand to heat the air more quickly than our application.

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TEWKS: Thanks - that's similar to what I've been looking at - a Reznor - somewhat similar to what your using. The Reznor is power vented, but I'm not sure I require that. 4500BTU's.

 

EDIT: So apparently is the Modine! Bonus!

 

linky

 

Since I'm not going to be living in the garage, the Modine might be a better value. $572.00 Vs $839.

 

John - my garage has 10 ft ceilings and I'm not sure how insulated it is. The ceiling is insulated on one wall is common with the house. Not sure about the walls.

 

Rocer - You Winters are without a doubt colder than ours! Interesting observation about the cold floors, make sense. I've been planning to suspend it from a beam near the ceiling. I'm not sure I want to use floor space for the heater, but you've given me something to look into and consider.

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I use something like this.

 

Mine is round, but you get the idea. I can't see any need to continually heat the garage, so I just plug it in when I'm going to be working in the garage. 20 minutes will take the chill out of the air, and a bit longer will make it quite toasty in my two car attached garage.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just to follow-up - I decided to go with gas heat. I ended up going with a setup like TEWEKS. Thanks one and all for the ideas and input.

 

<a href=http://i1130.photobucket.com/albums/m540/indycar89/rez%20garage%20heater.jpg' alt='rez%20garage%20heater.jpg'>

[/img]

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And here's one advantage of going electric. After I posted this yesterday, one of the installers came crashing through the garage ceiling. He had just finished up putting the vent through the roof and was taking the ladder over to the stairs when he missed a joist. He landed on his fanny on one of the joists and was ok.

 

<a href=http://i1130.photobucket.com/albums/m540/indycar89/ceiling%20bmw%20st%20post.jpg' alt='ceiling%20bmw%20st%20post.jpg'>

[/img]

 

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John Ranalletta

As a friend might say, "Could happen to any one."

 

Sorry for the fall and happy the guy's okay. I opted for the electric heater due to small shop space. It's a tad noisy, though.

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