5 Buddy Heater Hacks You Probably Didn't Know! Don't Get Left Out

so today I'm going to go over five hacks or tips that will help extend its usefulness and make using this heater just that much more awesome for this video I'm actually going to use My Big Buddy Heater the big buddy has two heating elements and it has two propane tanks one on each side as you can see here the regular Buddy Heater has one heating element and one propane tank on the sign so this is just a double sized version of the regular buddy and of course they have other versions of Mr Heater Buddy heaters so let's get right into this alright so the first tip we'll talk about here is the fact that you can use this Mr Buddy Heater for more than just a heater you can use this to cook on boil water make coffee you know just basically using it to cook and to do that there's a couple different ways so one way that people show is that you can take this front grille off you just pull this off and you can flip it you know stick it up under the handle this one on the Big Buddy doesn't fit underneath the handle real well so what people do is they jam it up underneath there and then they Bend this down now sure if you're in a pinch that's one thing you can do but I'm not really into like tearing these up especially since there's a very simple alternative to doing that so for me I don't take the front grille off I actually just leave the front grille on it's designed to keep you from burning yourself foreign so we got that put on let me show you what I do I went and got these grids these paint grids and basically these are used with rollers and five gallon buckets you can find these at your hardware store in the paint department or you can also find them on Amazon I'll put links down in the description but these work great so this is a smaller one and this one will work on the Big Buddy and the regular buddy and it's sitting in a nice spot right where most of the heat is going to go up so this works they're very thin they're still strong enough to be able to hold a pot or whatever it is you're needing to cook on but yet they're still thin enough to bend very easy you can bend them and mold them to the way you want now for this big buddy I don't use the small grid this one's for my regular Buddy Heater for my big buddy I just bought a little bit bigger size [Music] and this one fits just perfect on there and it gives me more space up top works great you can put a pot on here you can boil water very quickly and I've actually had this running for quite some time before I don't do a lot of cooking with these I usually use these for other purposes which you'll see later in the video but I've actually had these on here for quite some time and I have never really had an issue with it melting the handle now I'm not going to say that won't happen but if you're wondering how hot this handle is going to get and if it's going to melt I really haven't ran into that issue but if you have had that issue or if you have any comments about using these paint grids please leave information down in the comments to help everyone out so that is basically tip number one or hack number one is to just go get one of these they're you know anywhere from three to five dollars typically for these little grids and they work perfect and they're very small and I just basically keep them with my heater when I put it up so very easy to store this if you're already having to store this all right for tip number two we're gonna also go back to tip number one and we're gonna use this grid now again you can use the front of this heater to put these little fans on and this is what tip number two leads us into is the stove fans and these work great to distribute heat but these don't actually sit on there really well unless you cut them a lot of people will get a hacksaw or a Dremel tool and they'll cut into the back of these little fans so that you can just sit them on the grill you know and that's fine you could do that if you wanted to but since I already have these paint grids and I keep these with the heaters I just come in here [Music] I put the paint grid on and now I have a huge surface here where I can put fans then I just pick any one of my favorite fans and I set it here to distribute the heat now here's the note on this you don't want to use these fans in heat environments that are higher than they can handle so if you read the top of these they'll typically say 345 degrees Celsius is the max amount of heat that they can handle that's around 600 degrees Fahrenheit which is pretty hot and these Mr heaters can actually put out that heat and more but you have this whole surface here to move this fan around and put it in the environment that it needs to be you're really getting your heat in about six inches right here in the middle so if you take care and put these fans where they need to be you can put these fans in The Sweet Spot of that heat without actually having to overheat the fan itself so you don't want to go and burn up all the wiring and everything that's on the back of these fans basically you just want to heat up the housing that's here so that way the thermal electricity can be generated and run the fans so you want to place them in the right spot now many of these heaters will come with one of these stove thermometers and if they don't just pick one of these up I'll put links to all of this down in the description to Amazon where you can pick these up pretty cheap and you can put this here to find out one where it is hottest and where is the appropriate area to put these fans I typically use my hand it's pretty simple to figure out and I usually put these fans right about here you want to get them just far enough in where the fan can get the heat to start generating these electricity on its own but you don't want to get it into the heat so much that it overheats the fan it takes just a moment for those fans to start kicking on but I'm going to let that generate some heat so you can see it all right so it's been about a minute or two and as you can see these fans are spinning quite quickly and they are pushing the heat forward which is exactly what their job is meant to do and if I put my hand above these fans up here it's a lot cooler than it was before but that's because it is pushing the heat forward instead of letting all of that heat dissipate above the top and basically get wasted now if you're going to cook something or do something on this grid then you know you want the heat to come up and believe me it does without these fans a lot of heat comes out the top especially if you have this on a higher setting than we do right now but on low I feel a lot of heat getting pushed forward from these fans and a lot less of that heat escaping out the top of this unit I also want to note here that don't be fooled by the temperature of this paint grid now I haven't had an issue with it burning the handles but it's kind of weird even though this is metal which should conduct the heat pretty evenly you're usually going to get a really hot section of this grate right here in the middle but over here like I can touch this and it's warm but it's not hot but if I touch right here in the middle it's going to burn my skin off so that's probably why I've never really had an issue on the handles because again I can touch these These are actually not even warm they're still kind of cold but it is very hot right here in the middle so they work really good but you have heating zones so just remember that when you're doing this because like some people that put these fans on these heaters they end up overheating them and melting all of the wiring and everything that's in the back of these heaters and really all they could have done is maybe moved it an inch forward or an inch backwards and it would have probably been no problem at all so take the time to figure that out when you're using your heater and make sure it works properly all right tip number three is this is a one pound propane canister and this is what typically runs these Mr Heater heaters this Big Buddy Heater actually uses again two of them one in each side so you will go through quite a bit of these one pound canisters if you're using this heater a decent amount like we do you can refill these now I'm going to put a disclaimer here it's actually not recommended to refill these one pound disposable propane canisters so here in the U.S it's actually against the law in many states to cross state lines or to even travel with one of these one pound canisters that you've refilled yourself so if you're going to be traveling in the United States with these heaters and you want to bring these along do not bring ones that you've refilled you're going to want to bring brand new ones now do people listen to that probably not but we do refill these and I have not really had an issue refilling them of course do that at your own risk but if you read the labels which most of the labels on mine are gone it does state that they do not recommend you refill these using these techniques that that people have nowadays but I have been able to refill these many times and I do use them refilled a lot in these heaters at our property I use these one pound containers way more than just in these heaters I've got torches and different types of little cookers and heaters that use these one pound canisters so I typically do refill those so to refill these they make these little devices here that you can again get on Amazon and I'll put a link in the description where you will just screw this onto the top of this canister and I'm not going to do that right now because it will let out the little bit of propane that's left in here the first thing you actually do is you screw this end right here into your 20 pound canister while it's closed screw it in nice and tight then you would screw this part of the canister into this nice and tight you would turn on your 20 pound canister and the propane that's in your 20 pound canister would then start filling up this one pound canister it's recommended to flip it over so that way the liquid part of the propane the more dense part of the propane is toward the valve so that way you can get a more dense amount of propane into this canister but this is one type of one pound canned filler my favorite type though is one like this that has a hose so that way I can just get my 20 pound canister flip it upside down I put this end of the hose on the canister and then I turn the canister on while I have this lever closed and then I can just put this on turn it on fill up the one pound canister turn it off take the canister off put another one on and this allows me to fill up multiple one pound canisters quickly plus it has the hose so you can leave your 20 pound propane tank upside down sitting there ready to go while you're using this end of this hose to fill up all your one pound canisters that is tip number three on how you can go about refilling those canisters do that at your own risk all right tip number four is as much a tip as it is a warning so you don't have to run these off of just one pound containers these little one pound containers are convenient because they fit in the side of the Mr Buddy Heater but they do sell adapters that allow you to put in a hose on this one pound connector and then run your heater to a 20 pound propane tank now that'll make these heaters run a lot longer but it does kind of make them a little more bulky so if you want to use that hopefully you have a place where you can put it and leave it not something that you're having to carry around with you because then that would be of course kind of heavy so if you are going to put this in a place where you will have it somewhat permanent you can get that propane tank hose that lets you connect into this and run these heaters off of the 20 pound tank instead of these little one pound tanks now with that said you want to run a filter on those hoses so Mr Heater does sell a hose that supposedly does not Leach any contaminants out of it no oils and no contaminants out of the hose which will keep from clogging your Mr Heater body heater but if you're using an aftermarket hose or even if you're using the Mr heater hoses I still recommend you getting those small little inline filters I don't have one with me here but we actually do have a hose and an inline filter on it because Mr Heater has said that the hoses when their manufacturing process there are pieces of those hoses and it's usually like oils and things like that in the hose that you know allow the hose to be flexible and everything else but they will leech small amounts of contaminants into the propane which will then go in here and clog up the little propane orifices that are inside of the heater and then your heater is not going to work but if you put those little in line filters on the propane hose when you hook it up to your heater those are supposed to catch those contaminants and keep from messing up your heater these things are getting more and more expensive every year so making these last as long as you can is pretty important and tip number five is a small little tip here that lets you know that you can move even though this you have to push down to move this between the different settings you can actually push it down and still move it basically at an infinite level between these settings so as you move it it will adjust more so you can even see that in that eye if you look closely as I turn this down below it is slowly gonna drop down so you can split the low medium and high you don't have to be only in low only in medium or only in high you can even go to high and get both of these heated up then you can push it down and actually still come through here and adjust that before that turns off so you can kind of hear there it's just barely putting some out but I can turn it up just a little bit to get not full-blown high but medium high so this is actually pretty useful when you're close to the heater I'll put the heater in the workshop or in the garage and yeah sure I can move it closer and further away but usually I'm having this heater set in a very specific spot so I want to dial in just the right amount of heat that I want now the other tip on that is I don't always like having this sitting on the workbench or on the table in my shop I actually have a mount that I put together to where I can hang this from the handle now on the back of these Mr Buddy heaters if we turn this around you'll see that they have the little mounts here where you can put a nail or a screw in the wall and you can mount them well personally this is kind of a pain for me to line this up while I'm trying to hold it up against the wall and line it up just perfectly with these screws so I don't have this screwed into the side of the wall or anything what I do is I actually hang it from the handle because I'm not normally needing to use this tray I usually just have it hung by using either some of these like cheap little you know hose hangers that you would get from your local hardware store or again I can put links to all of this down in the description I've got you know some little hangers like this and I've got hangers like this that work with the little racking systems that we have in the garage but I just go ahead and I pick this up and I just hang it on the wall using the actual handle and it has worked really well to put this exactly where I want it so between adjusting the heat on this and hanging this on the wall where I want the heat to come from it does a pretty good job of giving me the right amount of heat that I want for the situation that I'm in these heaters are awesome they're very efficient the fact that you can use them indoors makes them just that much better luckily I haven't had a problem with either one can't say enough good things about these Mr Heater Buddy heaters I hope you enjoy yours and I hope these tips will help you enjoy yours even more alright thank you very much for watching I appreciate it y'all take care

Channel: SeidelRanch

Views: 1,207,881

Keywords: seidel, seidelranch, seidel ranch, buddy, big buddy, mr heater, mr heater little buddy, mr heater buddy, mr heater portable buddy, mr heater hacks, big buddy heater, big buddy heater hacks, stove fan, paint grid, hacks, hack, tips, tricks, buddy hacks, mods, modifications, you didn't know, you don't know

Id: aqfO0mdzD8Y

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 31 2022