January and February were harsh months in Michigan, with temperatures regularly dropping near zero. They also happened to coincide with my decision to swap guts from one broken Jeep to another. Desperate to reduce my vehicle count to something more manageable, I invited my friend Dustin from Wisconsin to help me with the wrenching. It was grueling work, but it wasn’t so cold thanks to my garage’s small electric heater, which, I recently realized, burned away an absolutely absurd amount of my money.
Ever since I began writing about cars in 2015, I’ve taken pride in admitting my mistakes. They are oftentimes deeply foolish and embarrassing, but I have no shame, so why not share my idiocy with you, dear readers? If reading this spares even one of you the financial ruin I just suffered, then my mission is accomplished.
The image above shows me sitting on a rare 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee five-speed that I bought for $350. Unfortunately, the Jeep was missing its most important attribute: the stick shift. Luckily, my friend Dustin from Wisconsin had sold me his rusted-out manual ZJ for just $350 delivered, so I had donor parts ready to revive the red Jeep.
For three days straight, Dustin and I toiled. We had to tow both broken Jeeps into the garage, remove a transmission and transfer case, gut an entire interior, and deal with far too many rusty parts to even mention. (I documented our struggles in an article on Jalopnik a few months back). Since it was so cold outside — and since my landlord had asked me to make sure the pipes in the poorly-insulated garage don’t freeze — I had an electric heater turned on in the corner:
It’s tiny and doesn’t really shoot out a ton of heat, but it gets the garage to a comfortable 45 to 50ish degrees. Throw on a jacket, spin a few wrenches, and it’s enough to help me break a sweat.
I Wasted A Grand Because I’m A Fool
After Dustin and I had swapped the green Jeep’s transmission into the red Jeep, he headed back to Wisconsin, and I continued toiling on The Cheapest Car In America In 2009 (a cheap Nissan Versa) before driving the thing all the way down to Arkansas. From Arkansas I flew to LA for work, and a few days later I returned home and continued work on The Autopian, banging away on my keyboard all day for weeks.
One day, during a lunch break, I checked my bank account and saw an enormous withdrawal from my energy company. “What in the actual hell?” I thought. “I’ll look into this later.” The following day, I received this bill from my energy provider:
Holy mother of god.
FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE DOLLARS AND SEVENTY FIVE CENTS!
My heart began racing as I tried avoiding thinking about how many Jeep 4.0-liter engines I could buy for that amount. I logged into my DTE Energy account to look at my other bills, and that’s when I found the previous month’s statement, which I had somehow overlooked:
OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD.
SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX DOLLARS AND TWENTY THREE CENTS!
Oh no. Oh no.
That’s $1,182 for two months of electricity. I could literally buy eight used Jeep 4.0-liter engisfiewiodaiosfbasfbas [sorry, I fainted on my keyboard there for a sec].
To put this into context, the U.S. government’s “Energy Information Administration” lists the average monthly residential energy bill in Michigan as $109.86. And since I’m just a single dude living in a small shack, I’d guess that my bill should have been about $200 for two months, meaning my dumb ass wasted nearly a thousand dollars over over that span. One thousand dollars.
To understand what the heck happened, I looked at my energy usage, and saw that it spiked in February and March. Yes, you might expect to see a higher energy bill during these dark, cold months, but definitely not a 15-fold increase over a fall month (you can see that my average daily energy use jumped to 126.4 kWh; typically I use about 10 to 20 kWh).
Upon seeing this plot, I remembered my heater, and I sprinted as fast as I could to my garage to shut the damn thing off, as it was still blowing somewhat-warm air. Then I called up my energy company to better understand if this was indeed the cause of my now-inevitable bankruptcy.
“What I am seeing is a huge increase in usage during those two months,” the representative told me over the phone. “By any chance were you running any space heater or anything of that nature… or any sort of electric heat source?” she said immediately after, at which point I realized that maybe, just maybe, this whole stupid dilemma that I was now in was achingly obvious to most people, and that I was just an absolute cretin.
She then told me that her husband wrenches on cars, and experienced a similar shock when he saw what the electric space in their garage did to their energy bill. “Any sort of electric heat source…it quadruples your energy usage..it’s actually kinda shocking how much energy they use,” she told me, going on to suggest either routing my heater ducts from my house or using a kerosene space heater.
Let’s Crunch The Numbers
The heater in my garage is the King EKB2450TB, a 5,000 watt unit that runs on 240V of electricity. To convert the power output of that heater (which we’ll assume was going at full-bore: 5,000 watts) to energy, I have to multiply by time (Power = energy/time).
Given that I’m pretty sure the heater was on for the entirety of both billing periods — i.e. from January 12 until March 10 — I’m going to multiply 5,000 by 57 days in that period by 24 hours in each day to get 6.96 million watt hours, or 6,960 kWh. That’s roughly how much energy this heater should have used.
Let’s check this math real quick by looking at my overall energy usage, per my energy company:
According to my bills, I used 3,462 kWh between February 10 and March 10, and in the billing cycle before (January 12 to February 9) I used 3,462 kWh. Together that sums up to 5,840 kWh used in two months!
This is less than the 6,960 kWh that I just calculated my heater would use, so to understand this better, I dug into my energy data:
The data shows that the initial spike occurred on January 9. Then on February 10, it took a week long break — that’s the gap you see there between the two peaks. My energy usage spiked back up on February 17 and continued until March 7, when I apparently frantically turned my heater off.
From the start of my billing period, January 12, until February 10 (when I apparently turned the heater off) is a total of 29 days. From the start of the second spike, February 17 until its end, March 7, is 18 days. So the total amount of time my heater was on was probably 47 days.
So if we adjust the calculation I did earlier for my heater’s energy usage, it’s 5,000 watts times 47 days (instead of 57) times 24 hours a day. We end up with 5,640 kWh — that’s roughly how much energy I wasted during those billing periods solely on that heater.
That’s 200 kWh shy of the 5,840 kWh my energy company said I actually used over those billing periods. And as I said earlier, a typical household like mine would use about 100 kWh per month when not being an idiot with a space heater, so the math checks out. Electric space heaters are absolute guzzlers, and I wasted $1,000 to get a lukewarm garage for 47 days.
Natural Gas Is The Way To Heat Up Your Garage, Trust Me
Electricity is the least efficient way to generate heat, as you found out.
You might even say that a space heater like that is needs to be inefficient to work at all.
I have a small ceramic space heater that I used at my former residence (my room was drafty always) and it did not have much of an impact on energy bills. But it is a lot newer and likely far more efficient than that thing he used.
Not always. LP gas is pretty expensive, too. In fact, at my old house I was spending upwards of $500 a month to heat it using LP gas. My heater broke down and due to the untimely settling of my former landlords estate which resulted in his worthless son getting the house (previously his daughter was managing things quite well) my central heat didn’t get fixed for a couple of months in the winter. So I used the radiator type space heaters (2 of them) and my electric bill was never over $300. Then I moved out.
Also, using electricity to run a heat pump is also pretty efficient.
Indeed, we live in the dirty south, a heat pump is definitely the way to go, year-round. Our house is comfortable all the time (71-74°) and our energy bill is cheap (we also run a pump for water, too, I’ve been trying to justify investing in solar but when the power bill is so insanely low…).
Might I suggest an ASIC bitcoin miner to heat the garage. Sure you are still burning electricity to make heat but at least you are contributing to a hugely wasteful pyramid scheme as well. You might well get a couple of seasons of “free” heat until the whole crypto thing comes crashing down.
The new data center Microsoft is building in Finland is going to provide heating to over 100,000 households from the waste heat.
If you think that’s a lot of money, I had a Roomba Vacuum to clean my garage. Welp I had it used one time, now I cant find it anymore. Maybe shoulda kept the door closed.
Its probably halfway across the country by now…
Well, David, now that you own your own business, you’re gonna have to start itemizing your taxes. Now that you wrote the heating debacle, tax deduction!
I’m surprised you don’t have a waste oil heater. You have an unlimited supply of waste oil from your junkyard.
Would that be allowed considering pollution?
Probably not at the previous job but okay here.lol
Looking at the garage, I don’t think burning waste oil is really the pollution problem at DT’s house.
the concern would be lighting something else on fire and burning the rest of it to the ground.
I use one of those “radiator” type heaters. It’s a power hog, but it does a better job heating my garage than those IR ceramic units. Since my wife usually gets to the utility bills first, I have no clue how many hundreds of dollars this costs me, but my garage rarely gets below 38° because it’s an insulated tuck-under.
This reminds me of a not-so-funny time in my life when I was young, scraping by, living hand to mouth. It was an unusually cold, prolonged winter in Wisconsin. I was renting an older home that was probably 1600 sq ft. The woman who’d become my wife had already moved to North Dakota to begin her new job in earnest, while I was working 14 hours a day trying to keep my head above water financially and trying to save enough money to move out with her.
During this time, I was wearing double sweatshirts around the house and bundling up to keep warm. This house had a fireplace, although it let more cold in than it helped, even when it was operating. It used gas heat, but it was grossly inefficient. One month, despite keeping the thermostat at 62-65°, I somehow managed to still rack up a $486 heating bill. I just about died. And, on top of that, my young, dumb ass got the pipes under the sink frozen, so they burst and spewed water all over the kitchen floor and down into the basement. Bailing water out the front porch is the last thing you want to do deep in January, believe me. So, yeah, I feel you DT, I feel you.
Ugh. My apartment in grad school was all electric baseboard heating. Bed room, kitchen, and living room were all on separate thermostats so I kept the doors closed and the room I was occupying at 60 and the others set to 50. Unless I had someone over (wink, wink) I slept under a pile of blankets with the bedroom heat off.
That’s rough! The ending about figuring out the thermal capacity of actual money on fire was GOLD!
I just looked at the picture of the inside of your garage and shook my head
I actually started twitching a little bit.
I’m WAY too anal to be able to live with that. OMG….
There must not be a single person in the world rooting for the success of The Autopian more than your landlord (possibly the city of Troy, maybe?), so that you can move to a farm in Milford or Oxford or something.
Good gravy, David! I’m amazed the whole property isn’t on fire as I type this. You are completely out of hand, haha.
You might want to put an oxygen sensor in the garage if you are using a propane heater. An acquaintance of mine died from a propane space heater in his hunting cabin.
I dunno about an oxygen sensor, but if you’re using a combustion heater (diesel/propane/natural gas/wood stove) I’d put a carbon monoxide detector in. $20 from your big box home store, $8 from Aliexpress if you don’t mind buying no-name Chinese safety gear or the shipping time (a month or so, but the next heating season is half a year away).
Whoa. I used to use a propane heater in my old garage. Guess it was good that the windows were a bit drafty. My new place has a garage with a natural gas heater mounted on the wall, and is well insulated. It makes life very nice.
these things are getting more affordable too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o63LY1SpVCY
I made this mistake once, so I feel for you. In my case I already knew I’d forgotten to shut off the milk shed heater for a week before the bill arrived and had readied myself for impact. I discovered I’d forgotten when I woke to find the fresh snowfall miraculously melted in a pattern matching the section of roof I hadn’t finished insulating yet.
The garage is on its own meter, so the math was much easier. As I was only heating the garage to install the insulation at that point, I can say with certainty that that is one green project that did not match its cost recovery expectations.
If you anticipate more long wrenching days/nights in the garage in winter, it may be worthwhile to get yourself a woodburner. Using firewood definitely comes with its own pitfalls (Cost of a stove, chimney, you’ll need to get a good saw and cut your own/haul it to actually save money)
It’ll take a couple of seasons to pay for itself, But man, lemme tell ya. You cannot beat the amount of heat for the money. It’s borderline luxurious heat, and PLENTY of exercise.
That approach also has the benefit of making the acquisition of yet another elderly Jeep – this time, one with a PTO that could be used to, say, drive a saw for cutting firewood – an entirely practical purchase.
Keep in mind he’s renting.
Insulation and a heat pump would be advisable. They have little ones that still have a COP of 2 or so at single digits F. That’s twice as efficient. So it still would have been a lot of energy, but nowhere near as bad. And they only get better as the temperature rises. Plus air conditioning in the summer.
And depending on how green the local grid is, they really help reduce pollution if that’s a consideration. The greenest is not heating the garage at all. But a line has to be drawn somewhere.
I came to post the exact same thing. A 20 SEER mini split system and basically any insulation would have made the winter a lot cheaper and warmer.
Or for half that cost, you could buy:
https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200577749_200577749
I’m certain you could handle the install and that your landlord would approve.
I live a couple of hours from David and have a slightly larger one of those that I use to keep an insulated 36’X48′ building with a 14′ ceiling at about 47º. My monthly LP expenditure during the winter is around $200 for that (shop is on a separate LP tank from the house).
Life lessons learned the hard way. Not as bad as the time you dyed clothes in oil and nearly had your dryer explode. I can’t wait to hear next years lesson about how you almost blew up your garage welding something on top of your natural gas heater.
I mean, in the summer, you could also add insulation to garages which further decreases the amount of heating required as well. Buying rolls of insulation and some cans of spray foam isn’t too expensive.
Nissan: the new Z packs a 400 horsepower twin-turbo V6 for just $40,000.
David: I could buy 250 Jeep engines for that money! What a ripoff!
Let’s just use the Jeep engine as the yardstick for everything. How tall is David? 2.12 Jeep engines. How much does he weigh? 0.35 Jeep engines.
And then people can complicate matters by choosing dry versus wet weight, and whether the fan should be installed or not when you measure length. The Brits can have their own system, based on the BMC A-series.
Solution: Tear down the garage and convert your house into a wrenching area. Keep a bedroom, bathroom, and the kitchen free of cars.
This also reminds me of architecture school. We all competed in making the greenest, most environmental projects, but a third of my classmates would run electric heaters underneath their desks at all hours – even after classes discussing different kinds of heating sources and their energy usage.
Here in the Midwest ™ we have a large number of houses that were built “All Electric” because the owners would get a rebate from the local electric utility. The rebate was never passed on the the subsequent buyer so what they get is a higher electricity bill than their neighbor that has natural gas for their heat.
In the house that we just remodeled and moved into we switched from electric ranges to gas cooktops and electric ovens. The heater and water heater were already gas. One of the reasons I had them make the switch was the cost of cooking all the meals on electric applianced.
If I only had electric, I’d be looking into heat pumps (for HVAC as well as heating water) and inductive stoves. Modern heat pumps can heat effectively and pretty efficiently to -5F, but I’d still have some sort of aux back-up source. Inductive stoves solve a lot of my complaints against normal electric stoves.
David, you are a constant source of entertainment. Don’t ever change.
Would some heat tape on the pipes satisfy your landlord? I’m not sure how much electricity they use but I have to imagine that they would be much less total since they aren’t heating the entire garage.
right heat tape
https://www.amazon.com/Frost-King-HC30A-Heating-Cables/dp/B00427COLA/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?dchild=1&keywords=Thermostat%2Bheat%2Btape&qid=1609425921&sr=8-1-spons&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExUzZDMUUyTjAzN1BDJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwNzM2MDk5M0Q2Mlk3Wk4yMEI1WiZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMDk2OTE4MzBJWUxQWU5YRjA2USZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU&th=1
then temporary heat for working out ther
Bubble wrap makes good insulation, and it’s free/cheap.
I should mention that I DID use a torpedo heater before. They’re incredible – basically like huge jet engines on your garage floor. But my landlord put the kibosh on that and installed this little electric demon.
Torpedos (we always call them “salamanders”) are too darn loud and stinky. That’s what I used to heat my garage until last winter. I installed a little electric heater; though it’s only on when I’m actively out there. My garage is an un-insulated, detached two-stall from the ’20s. It would cost a fortune to actually warm up. But in ~15F weather, with the heater on, it gets warm enough to be comfortable in jeans, sweatshirt and beanie.
I’ve always been amazed there isn’t a heat pump space heater. Something like a window (or portable) AC unit but backwards.
They have em
https://www.hvac.com/heat-pumps/best-portable-heat-pumps/
I looked at those… then I just started looking at low-end mini-splits. Might be worth it; it’d knock the humidity edge off in the summer too.
Mini splits are basically that. They’re not portable. But they can be installed by a somewhat handy person.
Interesting that it was the landlord who installed that thing and told you to turn it on. Hopefully he reads this article and pitches in.
Since your landlord asked you to keep the garage warm using an electric heater, ask the landlord for a contribution towards the bills.
I’ve been plenty happy using my tank-top propane heater (one that looks like a cylinder and has 360 degrees of fire/warmth) in my insulated two-car garage. Typically, I only need to run it on medium/low for about an hour before the garage is plenty warm, at which point I shut it off, and the insulation keeps everything acceptable for the day.
I am missing any kind of sweep on the bottom of the back door out to the patio, and the ceiling is at least 12 feet high, so I never tend to have any issue with CO in there.
And boy is it way cheaper than…that.
Keep in mind that carbon monoxide has about the same density as ordinary air, so it doesn’t tend to rise or fall. Having 12 ft ceiling height does give you more air to dilute it, but I wouldn’t necessarily count on that for safety, CO can just make you tired and stupid (symptoms we experience occasionally anyhow).
When our furnace died, we had to heat our house to about 55° in December with a fleet of space heaters and ended up spending about $600 to be absolutely frigid for a month until it was repaired. It’s astounding how expensive electricity gets when you start using it just to heat a large space in MI, let alone an uninsulated garage.
My previous house was all electric-resistive heating. Even at the $0.07/kWh we have here winters hurt a LOT on the ol’ wallet. It was nice to be able to have individual temperatures per-room, but… ouch, especially when you have beautiful old trees that make solar panels not an option.
My new house is conventional gas forced-air (with an A/C) and gas water heater. …but I have a massive SE-facing roof just BEGGING for solar, so I’m running spreadsheets on use cases involving hybrid electric water heaters, A/C, an electric car charging station to see how much lifestyle I have to tip back electric before solar starts paying off.
David reminds me of my teenage son. $500? That’s 2 Jeep engines! My son buys a student lunch at the local deli. All his cost metrics are in “sandwiches”. So $600 = 100 $6 sandwiches. Which is probably half a school year of lunch.
Where I live in Maine the local Utility charges an additional 60% fee in “delivery”. So the 15year energy loan was cheaper per month to go solar then paying for our utility. We’ve now paid off the loan and our neighbors keep asking how we like the solar setup. It’s great. The rebate bought us half of our used Kia Soul EV (it’s boring but costs nothing to run). Our bills are waaaay less now. We also installed 2 heat pumps and added better house insulation. Cozy and cheap heat nowadays.
Fellow Maine native here – that deregulation that was supposed to save us all kinds of money by splitting up the generation and delivery of electricity sure has worked out GREAT, hasn’t it?
I took an alternative tack and bought a winter place in Florida – rented my place in Maine so the oil and electric bills are no longer my dilemma. But still looking into heat pumps, as the tenants are willing to pay for it. Wish they could afford solar. If I was still living there and paying the bills both would be no brainers. In FL, I pay less for electricity delivered than JUST the electricity in Maine. Crazy.