|---UPDATE FEB 2014---| The heater is still going strong. I end up using it 3-4 days per week during the colder months, anywhere from 4-8 hours per day. We recently had a real cold snap here with overnight lows at 15 below or colder. The coldest morning in my garage workshop began at 22 degrees. I found that in this extreme cold the heater couldn't warm up my un-insulated garage quite as well. This isn't a total surprise: I'm not an expert in thermodynamics, but it would make sense that a space heater laboring against extreme cold is going to struggle more than just warming up a cool space. Anyway, the 10 degree per hour temperature rise I experience on cold mornings (i.e. going from 40 degrees to 50 degrees in my shop on a morning where it is 20 degrees outside) was halved on bitterly cold mornings. It took the heater 4 hours to raise the temp from 22 to around 40 degrees. In other words, on extremely cold mornings I get more like a 5 degree temperature rise per hour. This is not a criticism of the heater! It was still 5 below outside and I was working in a 40 degree space, so I was quite happy. I will update this review again should anything change. |---ORIGINAL REVIEW---| We have cool to cold weather about 5-6 months out of the year. I have a three-car tandem garage and the tandem spot is my workshop area. It is slightly larger than a 1-car spot and has high, 14' ceilings. It is open to the other 2 spots in the garage. The garage is uninsulated and gets down to about 30 degrees on the coldest nights. I have tried various heating solutions for this space. Conventional home space heaters simply don't put out enough heat at 5,000 BTUs, and I only have one circuit running to the garage so I couldn't run a second space heater. I tried the parabolic dish type heaters, but those tended to create uncomfortable "hot spots" when pointed at a person for too long and as soon as you moved out of the aim of the heater, you were back in the cold. I looked into the petroleum-based heaters that don't need to be vented, but if you do any research on those the health consequences seem like they could be bad. After searching for something more powerful, I came across this DR988 heater. I purchased it along with the Leviton 5376 30 Amp, 250 Volt, Surface Mounting Receptacle. I paid an electrician to run the 240 line and install the receptacle. This heater is exactly the solution I was looking for! It provides a warm, even heat that is blown out with surprising force. It is this air movement that is key, because it means the heater is sucking in cold air from behind it at an equally rapid rate. Putting it on the floor really helps, too. Since hot air rises, blowing the hot air along the floor allows the air to transfer heat to the floor, walls, and furniture before it rises to the ceiling and is wasted (I don't much care to heat air that is 5-10' above me). I point the heater at my primary work location. It is about 4-5' away from me on the floor. The warm air creates a really nice work space right around me, but it never gets too hot or uncomfortable. At the same time, it is warming the air throughout my workshop so when I move to a different spot in the workshop, I find similarly warmed air. It will consistently raise the temperate in the tandem spot in my garage 10 degrees per hour. The warm air trickles out to the two-car spots as well, as that area seems to warm at about 5 degrees per hour. Basically, I can walk into my workshop when it is 40 degrees and I'm wearing a coat and turn this heater on. After 2-3 hours, it is totally comfortable and I'm not even wearing a coat anymore. I did the rough math on the cost to operate this unit. At 19,000 BTUs, it costs me about $0.20 to $0.25 per hour to operate. Very worth it to enjoy working in my workshop year round again. As an added bonus, the always-cold bedroom located above our garage is suddenly much more comfortable on the days when I use this heater to warm up the garage.
