A heater for a one car garage.

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My one car garage isn't heated and I would like to keep it warm. 60-65 is fine.
What would be a good heater that isn't to expensive but would ehay the whole room?
 
how airtight is your garage?

Might be able to convert a radiant kerosene heater to run on waste engine oil.
 
Depends on your use.

If it is an escape to get away from the wife when she has her girlfriends over, I'd get a very small pot belly stove or something they use to heat an ice fishing shack.

When I had a connected garage I was always hobbying around in there, I ended up just keeping the cars in the driveway.

Nice to have a beer and sort motor oils and sharpen tools in the long Winter months.

Having a car in a heated garage in the Salt Belt where I live makes it unusable for car storage anyway, unless it is a leased vehicle.
 
Get a De' Longhi oil filled heater....

Look at Lowes...

Fire Department's love these, they don't start fires, and need no attention.

The De' Longhi version has a "*" setting, which is just above freezing, about 40...
 
Originally Posted By: Falken
Depends on your use.

If it is an escape to get away from the wife when she has her girlfriends over, I'd get a very small pot belly stove or something they use to heat an ice fishing shack.

When I had a connected garage I was always hobbying around in there, I ended up just keeping the cars in the driveway.

Nice to have a beer and sort motor oils and sharpen tools in the long Winter months.

Having a car in a heated garage in the Salt Belt where I live makes it unusable for car storage anyway, unless it is a leased vehicle.


Can you elaborate why can't you put a car in the garage in the salt belt?
 
Originally Posted By: ram_man
Can you elaborate why can't you put a car in the garage in the salt belt?


Assuming a daily driver type thing and not just a car being stored, it won't be a car for long if you do. It'll be a pile of rust.
 
Because while rust never sleeps it's certainly more active at warmer temps.
Taking a wet, salt encrusted car into a warm garage is a sure way of accelerating the rot.
 
Depending on how involved you want to get, there are plans out there to make an oil burning stove out of an electric water heater for real cheap.
 
Need more info. Is garage attached or by itself? Insulated?

Are you looking to heat it for the winter or just the days you go in there?

Do you have gas (natural or propane)? 220V in garage?

Can you install a flue going up or out the side?

I have a propane torpedo heater. Its about 85K BTU and gets the garage nice and warm in 15 minutes.

I am looking for something in the ceiling like a LP gas infared heater.
 
I use a 135k btu kerosene torpedo heater in my uninsulated 30' x 60' garage and it gets very comfortable on the coldest days in about 30 minutes. It's a little noisey but if I keep it behind a tractor it's quiet enough on the other side of the garage for a cell call. It can get a little costly when really cold outside (<20'F) and can go through ten gallons of K1 per day.
 
If you're going to plug it in one heater will draw about the same as the next... it's limited by your wiring and breaker.

How often are you going to be out there? Infrequently means something cheap to install but expensive to run like electric baseboard. All the time means wood pellets/ propane/ zone off the house etc.

In between, I like the wood stove idea; generally you could scrape up 1/2 cord a year picking debris out of ditches, stuff from the dump, etc.
 
If you are just looking to keep an engine warm, there are efficient options. Airplane guys place small heaters under the engines. Or they use plug in "block heaters". Works fine for cars too.

If the heat is temporary in nature, 1000w of electrical heating gets you about 3400 BTU...not much, that is. But 220v electrical heaters of 4500w or so make enough heat to rapidly heat a small, insulated room.
 
I wouldn't have an open flame anywhere you're planning on doing anything with flammable chemicals, and a garage/shop is one of those. Every winter there are news stories about people who burned their garage down because they used flammable chemicals around an open flame.

An isolated (so the flame isn't in the shop), gas fired heating system is the only way to heat a garage or shop in my opinion. I can work on vehicles, paint something, or work with flammable materials without fear of blowing something up, even in the dead of winter.
 
They use Salt on the roads where I am so I guess in order to mitigate the issue is frequent car washes in the winter?
 
If you get a car wash you drive out of the wash with a warm wet undercarriage. Even if you drive straight home you'll kick up salt dust with your wheels that will then stick to every surface you just moistened.

If you wash at home in your driveway, how do you keep the hose from freezing?

Leave well enough alone, IMO. Keep the car inside/outside in the cold. Wash the salt off when you're sure there won't be more salt for a while.

Remember, salt holds moisture, so something that would have dried as bare metal retains moisture in a salty slurry when salt is present. This is super nasty for the metal.
 
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