[67cruiser]

I tell you im using a propane heater, small in style big on btu,s paid 75.00$ new, low medium high settings, Hot spot bran. only way to go for now ,heats my garage in less than 10 min. and its a double car garage! give it a try

[bob65gto]

I use a couple of small hanging electric heaters. On the days that you just want to take the chill out, you only need to run one. Works fine.

[Keith Vrabec]

It depends on application and usage....

The grill tank torpedo is a nice cheap way to stay warm. I have a 150,000 BTU unit in a 25x50x11 high garage, insulated. WOrks well. Smells a little.

In my 42x50x12 building I have commercial gas hanging unit with power vent and propane. A bit expensive, I keep it at 45 degrees but heats up in about 20 min if I want to work out there.

The upstairs of this building has a 30x50 area, went witha Modine Hot Dog. That too works quite well. I leave it off unless working upstairs.

Total cost for buying and installing these was about $2500. But they're easy to install, I think i could have done it myself in the end and saved $950. But had reservations about goofing it up and grilling my junk! Called the professionals.

Waste oil smells and is dirty, usual hobbyst doesn't generate enough waste, unless of course you do your neighbors' oil changes.....Price for fuel is right though!

Consider a coal fired unit if coal is available locally. Nice automatic stoker units the size of a wood stove are available. Probably don't want paint anywhere near these or wood. Can't paint (at home) in the winter anyway, unless you're single or want to be! (Cheaper to keep her though.....Damn I wish my wife could paint a car....)

[firebirdcrazy1959]

was going to use an old moble home hot air furnice,but got the roof unit free.my one friend use's a hot air unit.he loves it.small 2 car shop

[THEGTOCHISM]

i had a old mobile home oil fired unit once in a 1 1/2 garage. It would run you out of there it was so warm. good choice.

[SRR]

Most mobile home heaters were run on kerosene and burn very clean needing next to no maintenance. A 55 gallon drum was the fuel tank.
An ideal set up if the garage is unattached is to add a small room attached for the furnace to get it out of the garage so you don't lose precious garage space, you don't have to listen to it and there is no danger of gas fumes finding it. Follow installation instructions to the letter, use a good full flow filter on the fuel line. You can even have it draw some of it's supply air from outside to keep the garage with positive air pressure to avoid drafts while your under the car.

[Mase]

We have yet to ask where it is that you live and how bad your winters are as that would make a HUGE diference. Also, do you have an attached garage or stand alone? Is it a single, two or three car?

I have used two bullet type heaters fed by kerosene and propane. They both will consume O2 at a fast rate so you will need ventilation. Kerosene just plain STINKS!, is greasey and the spark plug I had on mine kept fouling out. If you are going to use a bullet type make sure you get a BIG one since they can take awhile to really heat up a two car garage in very cold weather. The electric ones typicaly are not big enough BUT if they are they may need a 240volt hook up and will SUCK the money right out of your wallet fo energy costs. As for the "cheater" type way of doing it by tapping into your existing furnace and ducting a register to your garage would be a waste of time.

Tapping into a existing NG souce at your home and installing a properly sized heater wil save you the money at the end of the year by doing it ight the first time.

Mase

[Colin]

I've got wood.
HEH HEH HEH, HEH HEH HEH, HEH HEH HEH........He said "wood"
I have a Buck wood stove in my shp with a blower. It works great. Sucks if you want to heat the shop up quickly though. Im gonna install some kind of gas or propane heat to use for the times that I will only be there for an hour or two.

[Jack Gifford]

Originally Posted by smallblocker

Run a 5" pipe off your hot air plenum into the garage ...
I think it's illegal though...

I'm not sure about legality, but I believe the reasoning is that the home furnace will try to pull air from the garage (with fumes, etc.) into the house (to replace the warm air it forced from the house to the garage), even though you don't have an intentional cold-air duct from the garage- assuming an attached garage.

The best thing I ever did was to insulate the heck out of my garage- about 10" of insulation blown above the ceiling, fiberglass in the walls with 1/4" panelling all around. It's 26' x 34' x 10' high, and a small natural gas garage furnace (about 32,000 BTU if I remember right, no blower) keeps it nice to work all winter. Not hot, but can keep it at 60 degrees if I want to- it has a manual thermostat knob. The furnace requires a double-wall flue through the wall and up to eaves height, but it doesn't take much floor space- about 2' wide by 2 1/2' high by 18" out from the wall. I don't know prices ("inherited" it from mother-in-law), but I doubt it would be more than $200-300.

I do need to be constantly aware of the open flame- especially since I like to use gasoline to clean parts. And in the winter I have to limit any painting to small spray-can jobs. So far (more than 20 years), my only screw-up was changing a propane cylinder on a soldering torch, on the floor by the furnace. Some propane escaped for about one second and made a big "FOOMP" as it hit the furnace! I do have an exhaust fan to remove fumes from spray cans, solvents, etc.

Edit: Forgot to mention that about half of my garage has the second floor of my house above it, making it a little easier to heat.

[firebirdcrazy1959]

the heater i got is a roof unit,so i'll just set it on the side of the building and duct the heat in to the shop.

[rolling money pits]

wow, this baby is still going.

i live in the washington dc metro area, so winters can be brutal, or if too many folks spray their aquanet and the hole in the ozone layer gets a little bigger, the winters arent as bad. lol.

ive been privy to the kero torpedo jobs, and yes, those suckers can really stink the joint out. however, once we cleaned it, new plug AND put in a new kero pick-up in the tank, no odor at all. that thing was almost white hot all the way to the edge, as opposed to being just above orange 1/2 to 2/3s of the way around.

i also did, at my other house, a tap in on the house HVAC system. while it took out some of the pain of DC area swealtering humid summers, it didnt do too much for for the winter. this was with living space over the garage.

i think ill give one of those hanging electric jobs a shot, and see how it goes. if all goes well, and i win the powerball, i plan to have a detached built, then ill just get a small-ish high efficiency heat pump and be done with both heating and cooling.

the cost of natural gas is getting retarded. my bill this month was 2 therms LESS than last, yet it was TWICE the amount in $$$ i owed from before.

its a joke.

thanks to all the responded, it's given me some good ideas and avenues for looking. oh, and feel free to keep adding, one can never have too many options to look at.

[Mase]

Propane/Natural Gas Versus Electricity Costs

When comparing the costs of electricity and propane gas, the cost per BTU of each energy source must be considered in order to give the comparison a "common denominator." Electricity has 3,413 BTUs per kilowatt hour (kwh) and propane has 91,500 BTUs per gallon. Since electricity is considered 100 percent efficient at the point of use, there are 3,413 usable BTUs in one kwh of electricity (100% x 3,413 BTUs=3,413 BTUs). But even when 80 percent is used as the efficiency factor for a propane appliance (although some propane equipment is 97 percent efficient), there are still 73,000 usable BTUs in one gallon of propane (80% x 91,500 BTUs=73,000 BTUs).

Therefore, one gallon of propane contains the usable energy equivalent of 21.44 kwhs of electricity (73,000 BTUs / 3,413 BTUs=21.44). Simply, this means that if one gallon of propane sold for 21.44 times as much as one kwh of electricity, the cost per BTU would be equal. But propane sells for much less than this. In fact, according to 1991 Department of Energy figures based on national averages, gas costs about half as much to use as electricity.

Natural Gas & Propane Advantages:

Using Natural Gas in place of other fuels can help ease a number of environmental concerns — greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain, smog, solid waste and water pollution. When natural gas is burned, it produces virtually no emissions of sulfur dioxide or particulate matter and far lower levels of "greenhouse" gases and nitrogen oxides than such competing sources of energy as oil and coal.

Canada's natural gas wealth is abundantly obvious... we produce around 8 billion litres each year: 80% from natural gas wells in western Canada; the rest from oil refineries throughout the country. The total is about 10% of the world's supply!

There are six very good reasons why you should consider propane for your home energy needs:

Propane has a wide variety of uses: heating, water heating, cooking, clothes drying, swimming pool water heating, hot tub and sauna heating and emergency generators. Propane is also used to fuel car and trucks.

Propane is a clean-burning, environmentally-friendly fuel that can be stored safely in residential and commercial underground tanks.

Propane heating equipment is designed to operate efficiently. Some equipment can be as high as 96% efficient. that means for ever heating dollar you spend, you get 96 cents worth of heat.

Propane heats water at one-half the cost of electricity.

Propane heating and water heating equipment can be installed with special direct venting systems which do not need a chimney. This will save you money on retrofitting and unnecessary construction.

Unlike competitive fuels, most of the propane used in the United States come from North American sources.

A 1991 study by the Department of Energy (DOE) rated residential energy sources by the average dollar cost per million Btus of heat they produce. Natural gas was found to be $6.05; heating oil $9.30; propane $9.74; and electricity a whopping $24.15. Obviously, these amounts vary with local energy prices and do change over time, but in the relative world of energy, natural gas is by far the cheapest, most convenient fuel for water heaters.

http://www.nicorinc.com/en_us/commer...comparison.htm