Hi all, happy opening season!
Looking for some input on heating for the upcoming season. I currently have this little guy:
I found that it *seemed* like it was acceptable but certainly found even in the mid to low 70s with drops in the night that it really wasn't keeping up or doing much at all. Probably to be expected given its BTU rating. I'm looking at two options here:
1) selling it at a loss and getting a large heat pump or gas heater
2) doubling down and getting a second one of these little guys and running in parallel
the pros for the second option are that I already have a sunk cost into it that I won't have to take the hit on and they're relatively cheap for a second one. All-in, I'm still well under half the price for a bigger better unit.
the cons are that the BTU output will still be less than half of anything else I end up buying, but maybe it's sufficient for what I have? I also don't have a sense of what the electricity bill works out to from an efficiency perspective running two of these as compared to one big heat pump or gas heater.
Also considering the use case, which is that we're not going to need this all that often and heat pumps are slow. So on the balance, it feels like it might be more cost effective to fire up a gas heater on an as needed basis. The cons or at least question is the expense of the heater and how long to break even on the savings vs the initial overhead. And also that I don't actually HAVE an accessible gas line (which I do want for our grill anyway so maybe the cost on that is sort of a wash).
Thank you as always for weighing in!
Welcome your expert thoughts as always.
Looking for some input on heating for the upcoming season. I currently have this little guy:
I found that it *seemed* like it was acceptable but certainly found even in the mid to low 70s with drops in the night that it really wasn't keeping up or doing much at all. Probably to be expected given its BTU rating. I'm looking at two options here:
1) selling it at a loss and getting a large heat pump or gas heater
2) doubling down and getting a second one of these little guys and running in parallel
the pros for the second option are that I already have a sunk cost into it that I won't have to take the hit on and they're relatively cheap for a second one. All-in, I'm still well under half the price for a bigger better unit.
the cons are that the BTU output will still be less than half of anything else I end up buying, but maybe it's sufficient for what I have? I also don't have a sense of what the electricity bill works out to from an efficiency perspective running two of these as compared to one big heat pump or gas heater.
Also considering the use case, which is that we're not going to need this all that often and heat pumps are slow. So on the balance, it feels like it might be more cost effective to fire up a gas heater on an as needed basis. The cons or at least question is the expense of the heater and how long to break even on the savings vs the initial overhead. And also that I don't actually HAVE an accessible gas line (which I do want for our grill anyway so maybe the cost on that is sort of a wash).
Thank you as always for weighing in!
Welcome your expert thoughts as always.
