Topical question - what's a good safe heater for garage shop?

Pretty good timing, got this in the email from fine homebuilding today.

We use an oil-filled radiant heater all over the house and it's in my garage right now. It should do fine in your garage, especially if it doesn't get below 40. It won't heat things up fast, so you'll want to keep it on, but it has a thermostat so you can turn it down when you're not in there. They have them with timers, too, so it could change automatically if you wanted.

Since there is no open flame or exposed heating element, there are pretty safe around sawdust and flammable vapors.

Ok, while I know I am lucky to be in an area of the country where it doesn't get much below 40, but due to my extreme reaction to cold, I can't work in my shop unless it's over 65. I may have Raynaud's disease, since my fingers go to blocks of ice at below 50.

----------------------------------------------------- I'm with you, if it get's to be anything below 60F, it's not fit for human habitation IMHO.

----------------------------------------------------- I am looking for a good, safe heater for the shop. Safe, in that when use my saw or planner, any sawdust in the air won't catch fire. I'm looking at some portable radiant heaters that use 220v and I think they might work, but which one?

---------------------------------------------------- Don't know you're budget, but this unit would do a good job.

They indicate they are presently out of stock, but there are other suppliers with the same device or other brands of similar size.

Lew

That puts out 17,000 BTU. but you need a hefty circuit for it.

You can get almost 4X the heat at half the price with propane

Those things will have you sweating in no time flat, but they are very noisy.

---------------------------------------------------------- "Ed Pawlowski" wrote:

---------------------------------------------------------- Didn't see a BTU rating.

Unit is rated at 5000 watts, 26.1 A @ 240VAC.

A 2P-40A c'bkr and #8 AWG should handle the job.

Unit is sized for 525 sq ft.

A typical 2 car garage is about 20x20 or 400 sq ft.

-------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------- You also get to deal with the products of combustion in a closed environment.

Lew

I am in Washington state and installed a 5000 watt Fahrenheat FUH54 electric heater last year and have been very happy with it:

It would be expensive to run full time, but I am only in the garage/shop a few times a month so operational costs are minimal. It turns on with the flick of a switch and I don't need to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning from propane or natural gas.

When I built the garage back in 2001 I dreamed of having radiant floor heat, but couldn't afford the installation cost at the time.

Take care,

Anthony Watson

"Lew Hodgett" wrote in news:54ab549c$0$32956 $c3e8da3$ snipped-for-privacy@news.astraweb.com:

I'll note that 26A is a fairly sizeable draw, so it would be wise to consider what the service to the house is, and what else will be part of the load. A house with 100A service might not be able to handle an additional 26A.

John

That comes up all the time, but has never been a problem for me. I have a detached garage with minimal insulation.

On 01/05/2015 6:48 PM, MJ wrote: ...

They won't work for the purpose as they don't raise the overall air temperature but indirectly by re-radiation from objects which are in direct line-of-sight and get heated.

For your described symptoms I don't think they'll help a lick.

I tried one in the shop area in the barn and while if you're standing directly in front it'll toast your rear, you'll still be cold on the frontside.

The worst problem with the shop and tools is that any metal dark-colored object in the line of sight will get hot while everything else remains cold.

I think only a combustion or air-exchange system will prove to be satisfactory for your case.

It's not the insulation that matters - it's how well it is sealed. No problem in a drafty barn

With lows near 40, your best bet is a wall mounted heat pump. Here's the one I bought:

Only drawback is the price and you'd have to put in 220 if you don't have it. But you'd get heating and cooling.

Water in the seal room should not be your main concern.

"Well Sealed" is a scary thought when it comes to propane or natural gas. Regardless what the the Religion of Global Warming would like you to believe, propane and natural gas produce Carbon Dioxide. The problem is not that they will pollute the environment but that they can kill you, especially in a "Well Sealed Room". While you may get away with using propane or natural gas heater in this type of room for a couple of hours, a long period of no air turn over will allow the Carbon Dioxide to build to a toxic level. At that point you will no longer will be worried about heating your garage.

When you burn one pound (453 grams) of propane you will get one pound (453 grams) of Carbon Dioxide. 162g per m3 (35 ft3) and you are dead.

The following statistics are available many places on the web.

?In terms of worker safety, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit (PEL) for CO2 of 5,000 parts per million (ppm) (9,000 mg/m3) over an 8-hour work day, which is equivalent to 0.5% by volume of air.

?A value of 40,000 ppm is considered immediately dangerous to life and health. (NIOSH 1996; Tox. Review 2005).

?Additionally, acute toxicity data show the lethal concentration for CO2 is 90,000 ppm (9%) (162000 mg/m3) over 5 minutes (NIOSH 1996)

How much Carbon Dioxide comes from the breathing of all of the humans on earth plus the billions of air breathing organism vs the Carbon Dioxide from the relatively few industrial plants on earth

Very good point re: the moderate low temp range. My experience is for very cold conditions and while all true enough, the extremes aren't going to be nearly as bad for OP. But, still the radiant heaters don't heat a general area so I think they're no what he's looking for given his problem description.

The CO2 derived from respiration (human or otherwise) is soi-disant "Carbon Neutral". This means that the carbon is derived from recent past (i.e. the carbon you breath out comes from carbon you eat). This is a short cycle (respiration, incorporation into into plant-based foods, refined, eaten, and respired again). This means that respiration, regardless of the number of humans, is carbon-neutral. Likewise for cow farts.

Adding fossilized carbon (oil, coal, methane) is a completely different thing. These aren't using carbon that was derived from the atmosphere in the most recent growing season, but rather releasing carbon into the carbon cycle that had been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years. Whether this is good, bad or doesn't matter is still being determined, but it's hard to argue that it is changing the carbon cycle which drives life as we know it.

If you can create enough sawdust to catch fire, you won't be able to breathe. Dust fires happen in grain elevators, but AFAIK there has never been one documented in a woodworking shop.

By your logic the Carbon Dioxide from forest fires and the results of Volcano activity is carbon neutral because the government can not control it.

I don't recall mentioning either forest fires or volcanic activity.

Nor did I ever mention government in any way shape or form. One might think your reading comprehension is somewhat flawed.

But, for your information, the former is carbon neutral (with respect to an average 40 year cycle) and the latter releases sequestered geologic carbon (primarily from sedimentary carbonates).

You've left out the vast majority of the carbon in the atm cycle which is cyclically absorbed and released by the oceans on an annual basis.

For those interested:

That kind of fire never entered my radar because of the reasons you brought up. The only fire I would worry about might occur from dust building up on the heater, itself. After a long summer of woodworking and no heater use, the dust that builds up on and in the heater from a lazy shopkeeper who neglected to clean it out. Turn the heater on the first chilly day to heat up the shop and the dust catches fire. I know I can smell it on the top of my kerosene heater when I forget to blow the dust off. Maybe it's just not hot enough to light it up.