3 Ultimate Mr Heater Hacks (Simple Buddy Heater Modifications)

we're going to give you three affordable simple mr heater hacks that are going to make your buddy heaters work out here the way they should this video is sponsored by squarespace the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business hey guys it's drew from playing with stixx we take out small camper trailers throughout the state of alaska and if you're new to this channel basically what we do is share tips with you to help you be more comfortable out here if that sounds like you make sure you subscribe below but before we start i just want to put a disclaimer out here these hacks are outside of what the manufacturer had intended for these heaters so do it at your own risk i'm not an expert on this i'm just showing you some of the things we do and then second make sure when you're using these heaters just remember to keep it in a very well ventilated area use carbon monoxide detectors and definitely keep these away from flammable items all right so back into this so what this fan does for you once i get this heated up it's going to take this radiant heat that kind of hangs out here and it's going to blow it across your trailer and the other thing that it does really well these buddy heaters if you put your hand up here when they're going you feel all the heat rising up there's a lot of heat loss you put this fan on and once it blows across you put your hand here all the way out here you barely feel any hot air coming up it keeps it all down at the level where the people are which is where we want that hot air so it's hitting 200 right now so you just saw the fan kick on pretty cool how that works so these little fans they take absolutely no batteries they're based on the principle of a thermoelectric generator basically taking heat to create all the power you guys this was kind of a miserable day until i got this thing going so this is an amazing hack and i wish i could say it was ours but this hat came from code brown productions he's into drones and guns and trucks and just adventure and we just want to thank him for this because this really made a big impact so what i did here if you can see i added a notch to the front of the fan because originally i thought i was going to set it on the base of the heater but what happened by doing that is the heat did not rise quick enough the temperature on this so it took about 10 minutes to engage this on the low heat setting so then i went back through and put it in the back here it took 10 minutes the first time i did it when it wasn't out on the stand but once i moved it out onto the grate it takes 45 seconds to get the the fan to start moving so that's really quick 45 seconds now if i were you guys and i was to do this all over again i didn't want to re-dremel because i dremeled so much i barely have a base left i would go from the front here and dremel really far back that way you can set it on the base on the high heat setting if it gets so high it could damage the fan and then you can move it out more for the low heat setting to get that temp up faster to get the fan going so now what you're going to do you're just going to take this through the grate and you're going to stick it on like that and it stays very well balanced and as you can see it's sitting on the grate of this buddy heater which is getting all the heat up to it so it turns on really quickly now normally the fan doesn't engage like this but it's a really windy day okay now that the wind's died down we're just gonna fire this guy up and i'm just gonna show you how quick it turns on so and there she goes so i'm looking at the camera and it said 54 seconds here so these fans can be found all over online and you just do a basic google search for stove fans these are the fans that go on top of like a cast iron stove and they run from about 19 up to like a hundred some dollars we went with like a 50 version this round typically we'd stick down at the budget but we didn't want to test a bunch of them we wanted to make sure this worked and the one we went with had tons of great reviews and what we really liked about it was that it started up the fan at a lower temperature than all the other brands and it went up to a higher temperature and why it goes to a higher temperature is once this hits like 400 degrees there's a mechanism in here that tilts the fan keeping it away from the heat and allowing it to go up more and having one that goes this high it allows you to do the high setting of the buddy heater and still not mess up all the wiring that's inside this so i'm going to link this one in the description for all of you but i think it'll work with many different models out there before i hit the next hack on the next buddy heater i want to show you guys the super capacitor jump starter i brought with me so this is the supercap ii i'm excited to show you this one i didn't know what video to throw it in so i thought this would be a good place this is the technology right here i'm just gonna show you it really quick how it works so in the winter using lithium to jump start this is a little bit questionable all you need when you're using a super capacitor is enough energy in this battery to turn your dome light on so no you don't have enough power in here to jump the car but you're going to take that little bit of energy in here put it into the super capacitor of this autowit supercap 2 and then it's going to use all that energy that super capacitor and throw it out for a short period of time and so all it is is just connecting the jumper cables here so you're going to hook this to the corresponding terminal same here with the negative you're going to hear that beep that turned on the auto wit i don't know if you can see it so now it says it's charging it's about 10 15 20 and then when it's done charging here you're going to hear another beep so we're at 99 here and there's your beep so now you can't just go back and jump it start it you have to come here to the side and press this red button and you press it and then it'll go eight getting ready six five two 1 and now it's discharging i have 10 seconds to fire up the vehicle [Music] so what if this battery is completely ran down meaning you can't even run your dome light well that's pretty easy let's say i'm stuck back and i'm boondocking and i went in with four-wheel drive and the people that could help me out can't get into that spot with their two-wheel drive or i have to walk out to the highway to find someone well that's completely fine walk this out there charge it off of somebody's battery that energy will stay in this super capacitor long enough for you to get back and hit that red button another thing you can do which would be the option i would probably do because i like to be self-sufficient i would reach inside my vehicle and i would bring out one of my lithium battery chargers so this is a solar portable battery bank i would use this to charge this little auto width up now the issue with this is you just need to be patient when i charge this using the usb it takes about 20 minutes versus the two minutes it takes on the car and then you can do the same thing here with a 12 volt adapter charging it off of this as well which i think goes a little quicker but i haven't tried that option yet [Music] so we're going to go now from the buddy heater down to the little buddy heater and i'll come right back around to the buddy heater again for another hack simple hack on this one this one was given to us from a friend in the community it is one item here it's a coleman propane t attached to a propane cylinder so let me show you all right so here i have a 10 pound manchester now this would work best if it was a five pound and i'll show you that later but you're just going to take that off and this guy is going to thread you can see it right into there now if you had a five pound cylinder it's not as wide here so this second part of the propane t here is going to be open so you can actually attach another hose so you can be using this as a heater and then maybe using a grill or something like that a chair that's nice and toasty so once you put this propane tee on you're going to thread it into this propane cylinder by hand and then the directions say to tighten it down with a wrench and then once that's tight it is tight i mean this thing is sturdy and why i love this is now you have a large base down here that keeps it from moving around it's a pretty neat little setup pretty small it does the job of what we need of getting a lot more propane to the heater and keeping this heater steady other than that the only issue i could potentially see is that as you can see here there's not a lot of space here so at first i kind of worried me about safety but i looked at the other products from mr heater they have an aluminum one that mounts very similar to this very close to this i've been putting my hand down here every time i use this and it's basically ice cold i don't feel any heat coming out they're all designed to push the heat outward but that is something i would watch i'd be careful about just making sure this doesn't get too hot huge thank you to the sponsor of this video and that is squarespace.com recently we've had outdoor brands reaching out to us to take photos and videos of their products in the field and we quickly realized we needed a website as a landing page for these brands and literally i mean literally in one night we had the website up and running with client portfolios prices and the ability to capture requests for proposals for you outdoor enthusiasts who are ready to launch your own blog youtube channel or travel photo site squarespace is the go-to all-in-one website where you can get your domain build your website market that site and even set up your own store and all of this is basically drag and drop if this sounds like something you're interested in go to squarespace.com and sign up for your free trial and when you're ready to launch head to squarespace.com backslash playing with sticks for 10 off your first order of your first domain or website okay so this last hack does have some safety caveats that i'm going to talk about but what this is is converting your buddy heater into a stove so you're just going to turn this around you basically flip it upside down and stick it back into the same spot it was on if like us we will take our hot water heater here or item to heat our water in you put this on here this heats up much quicker than you would imagine and you're having boiling water out here no issues really with the stove where the issue would be is if you put food on here and you were indoors and that food hit this coil food has chemicals on it that gives off basically a gas like carbon monoxide so a food hit this it's not designed for food and it may not be able to pick that up in the air so definitely do this as an emergency situation these are heaters right this is a heater first and foremost but i think you could take this out with you and in a difficult survival situation you could pull this out and easily cook food on it it gets to some extreme temps you would cook really fast and even if you're not using it as a main heat source these are a great safety backup in case of an emergency you get stuck out somewhere in cold weather they are so great to have with you all right guys stay safe out there and we'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Playing with Sticks

Views: 1,173,402

Keywords: buddy heater, mr heater, mr heater buddy, mr buddy heater, portable heater, camping heater, heater, add on, portable stove, camp stove, propane, fan, stove, stove fan, hack, modification, propane heater, mr. heater, mr heater indoors, buddy heater indoors, camping, portable buddy, camper heater, rv heater, heat powered stove fan, stove fan heat powered, teardrop trailer, small camper trailer, wood stove fan, tent heater, playing with sticks, alaska, ice fishing

Id: Mjj8mCEuAnM

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020