Off Grid Heating: Martin Propane Heater Review

so the weather it's a little bit snowier since I was here last last time we were here was the winter camping adventure we got foot more snow now and we're just getting the cabin all warmed up with our propane heater so it's the Martin propane heater I want to tell you a little bit more about it and some of the pros and cons of it I've discovered over the last ten months or so extremely deep powder that we have here right now probably about two or three feet in the bush a little bit tricky for walking around but it's so beautiful and peaceful out today of course the birds greeted me here as usual so that was pretty nice to have a little welcoming committee they're really hungry you know they stashed thousands of seeds that I've given them over the season but it's nice just to have a fresh meal so we just got here and it's minus 10 with 16% humidity I'll just show you how long it takes to heat up with a setting for the Martin heater on high it's taken about three hours for the entire cabin to heat up to 17 Celsius from minus 10 now keep in mind everything was frozen inside everything was at minus 10 the walls the cupboards everything in here was frozen so that's why it takes so long to heat up so definitely take that into account when you consider this heater the space for our cabin is 240 square feet so as the unit senses the temperature in the room is getting up to what you desire it sort of scales back on the gas usage when it reaches temperature it will shut off and just the pilot will go here for example its reach temperature and the pilots just remaining on one drawback which I think it's the same for a lot of propane units is that when you first get to the cabin you must purge the air from the line and the gas can get to the cabin the unit here so basically involves your grant to pilot and holding this down for about 30 to 40 seconds and then you know using the igniter about every 5 seconds or so to get the pilot lit once the pilots lit it's no big deal you basically just turn the knob around and more gas will come into the unit and it'll light up really well so when you're away from the cabin for a while you know it's a little bit of a pain to purge the air from the line and ignite it but really it doesn't take that long to get things going and you know it you really have to purge the line if you've only been away for a few days or whatnot it's mainly if you've been away for two three four weeks and you come back to try to turn the unit on it's gonna take you a little bit of time and that's to be expected however I really like how it's really quick and easy to start especially you know it's a lot easier I think than having a wood stove we have a lot of family members that make want to come up and visit and this is so much easier for them to get going versus you know some chopping some wood trying to get the wood stove going so thinking of everybody this is problem the best choice for for all of us it's an attractive unity fits right next to the wall this one inch clearance from the combustible wall surface and what's really nice is that it also has very small offsets from other you know features of the house like from windows and from the soffit and from you know plugs outside so that made it really attractive that it could be really flush against the wall out of our way especially when we don't use it obviously other than sort of late fall to very early spring so we'd want to be tripping over a wood stove for example during the off-season I did consider a wood stove way back when but originally built this cabin we didn't really have a wood stove in mind because we didn't want to stay here in the winter but that quickly changed of course so you know in terms of the wood stoves we looked into those little ship stoves the cub series the cub mini but those they weren't ulc approved and CSA approved so that meant we couldn't get away with the minimal offsets from combustibles ventilation pipes we're about three inches in diameter that's four inches so that's really narrow you're really gonna have to clean those out very frequently or you get a lot of creosote buildup in there and then you could have a real problem so that wasn't attractive to me nor was chopping wood into these little itty bitty sections to stick in these smaller ship stoves every few hours that just really didn't do the trick for me with this unit it's thermostat controlled and so you know I don't have to babysit it basically when the temperature hits where I want to be on this unit it'll shut down and the pilot will stay on if it senses it's getting cooler in the cabin it ignites again so that's really nice it's a hands-off thing I don't really have to babysit it like I would a wood stove it's quiet and it doesn't stink which is another huge advantage over our old kerosene heater the kerosene heater would create a black soot on all surfaces in the cabin evening your nostrils if you spent any time here it smelled really bad this unit is directly vented to the outdoors so no worries for carbon monoxide and less say gasket inside failed also no odor except for when you initially buy the unit and you have to burn off the oils that they there at the manufacturing plant but it's quiet doesn't stink and you know we still have carbon monoxide detectors in the cabin even though it's a low risk with this unit you always should have one set up because if something was to fail inside and it was to be a leak of the carbon monoxide that could be a fatal mistake so I'm really happy with this unit over the kerosene heater we used to have so the nice thing about this unit is the front comes off and then you can kind of access the inner burners and the pilot and things like that so we'll see how easy this is to take apart I'm not convinced it's that easy to take apart and clean manufacturer recommends every year to to kind of go through vacuum it out check everything check the seals check the gasket which is a really good idea but it kind of you know I don't really wanna have to unscrew from the wall and kind of you know get into the back guts of it so I'm hoping that going through the front will be easy enough probably just unscrewing a bit of that front glass there once I'm inside the unit definitely on a vacuum out those little pieces right there I think that will make the flames a little bit more uniform a drawback obviously is getting a professional in to do the gas connection that I did not feel comfortable doing myself so last spring we had someone in to do that for us which was costly in our area it is quite costly to do that so yeah it's just a choice we made but I mean I'm certain if you were very competent and gas connections and fittings that you'd be able to do it yourself a major drawback obviously is a dependency on cocaine and that's course propane prices availability they can fluctuate so that's one thing that you know you have to get to consideration if you're looking at propane or even a natural gas heater like this one you know town isn't very close from here you have to disconnect the the tanks and take them in to get filled and drive them back not as risk with that but it's not too bad if we were here more often than we are then I would definitely go for the larger hundred pound tanks or even larger than that because then I would probably put in like a propane fridge and a little stove or something like that and I'd probably get to quite a large tank set up to do that so you know we'll see how it goes it does chew through a fair amount of propane I think about a liter an hour when you have it really turned up on high obviously the pilots on it doesn't consume much gas at all if it gets really cold out here you're in the - 20s - 30s this is running an awful lot and you can expect it's going to go through a fair amount of propane so but I mean you go through a fair amount of wood I guess for your wood stove as well so you just got to think about that if propylene becomes less available or more expensive then we're gonna have to revisit this idea this unit is about 80% efficient which is a little bit of a drawback so really when it says it's a 20,000 BTU unit you're only getting about 16 thousand BTUs out of the unit on max so that's a bit of a drawback you know we don't you get natural gas furnaces and things like that we're talking in the high 90% efficiency so you know you're not you know you're gonna go through a bit more gas to produce the heat that you want so let's head out know outside I want to show you what happens when one of my propane tanks runs dry and I don't want the unit to stop working let's go take a look so there's the exhaust vent it's completely vent into the outdoors so that's great we don't have to crack a window and this does it gets really really hot so you'll be very careful obviously but it's perfect has to be a specified distance from our open soffit but we have more than enough clearance there there's the window so you can see the distance there one thing with the installation with this that I found really challenging was you had to make sure to have an angled in a downward fashion so that you know if it rains it's not going to roll into your unit so I found that really challenging to get that lined up from the inside and I still cover it you know when we're not here because I don't want insects to get in there and I don't want snow or rain to drip in there because I really don't trust the angle that we put it in I measured it seems like it should be okay but I don't know I think if there's a driving rain I'm afraid that it would rain and go into the unit also I'm really not a fan of the larger holes on the exhaust vent I realize that's got to be there but you know we do have fair amount of bees and wasps and hornets and other insects that would very easily crawl through that mesh so I'm not really sure the solution is there I don't want to put another a lighter mesh over top god forbid I do something to the ventilation capabilities but if you guys have any ideas let me know we have 240 pound tanks back here and this one first tank is almost empty I have it on an auto switchover regulator right here so that's very handy for when the gas runs out it'll just start running on the other tank and we'll go from there as we spend more time here these tanks will definitely be switched out to something larger at least hundred pounders on each one we could possibly get a larger tank in here but I have to sort of see the usage that we have over the coming year and we'll go from there you can see right now that I have it set up to draw from the tank on the right and beneath the knob there it looks like the tank is empty you can see a red bar let's show you how easy it is with the auto switchover regulator to switch to your second tank I was drawing for the right tank and it's empty how is the propane heater even working well I've got an auto switchover regulator and what it's doing now even though I have it set to pull from the right tank because it's empty it's actually pulling from the left one on this side so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change out the one propane tank that's empty it's really easy to do that without interrupting service to the heater in the cabin with this regulator so let's do it so want to make sure that you turn this over now to the left tank and what this is gonna do is shut off the gas into this pigtail right here so that I can take this tank off so I'm just gonna close it up unscrew it didn't take me too long to get that off I sort of warm it up with my hands and I use this to kind of loosen the connection so we can take that into town and now the heaters working solely on the other the other tank there that's full and you can see now that I switched it to the left tank that the indicator underneath the knob is now black just to show you I put a little bit of saliva on there and it's not bubbling so there's definitely no leakage from the second pigtail when you do the switchover but just remember the tanks won't automatically switch over unless you open the valves on both of them at all time so that when your one tank runs out the unit will draw from the second tank if you forget to do that you will lose fuel to the system and experience an interruption in your heating it is an expensive unit and hooking up the gas to is an expensive endeavor as well to rebind a hundred percent committed to this this type of heater before getting one because there it's not without expense obviously unit itself the installation well we did ourselves but the the gas installer professional gas installer comes you know pretty hefty price when you're sort of away from town and also you're going to be buying you know your tanks and the propane to fill them so that can be a drawback for sure's is the costliness of trying to set up this unit environmental advantage to having one of these units as they burn relatively clean compared to a wood stove I mean wood stove produces out a lot of chemicals into the environment they can be harmful and this unit obviously is a lot cleaner than than burning wood recently Montreal had a smog alert in place over the winter and a lot of it had to do with everybody's wood stoves were all fired up during the cold snap so people were you know requested to kind of dial back on their wood stove usage because it was creating a smoggy effect within the city so that's something else that keep in mind if you're looking for some it's a little bit more environmentally conscious in terms of what you're what you're you know producing and reaching into the air around the cabin the propane stove beats out the wood stove one thing I am missing with this propane stove is the ambiance of having a nice wood fire the really dry heat you get with a wood stove you don't necessarily get with this this will dry out the cabin but it's not as dry as say a wood stove and you of course to smell the wood stove is wonderful and seeing all the the flame action of a wood stove is great you do get a bit of a fix here so you can see the the flames through this unit we paid a little bit extra to get that glass plate on the front so you can see the flames so you know that's that's nice but really it doesn't compare to a wood stove when it comes to the ambiance of that kind of heater this is what the heater looks like on high it's a completely off grid model and that it doesn't need power it just operates just with the propane and the heater itself but as you can see up here I've rigged up a little fan above the the heater to blow the heat around I might actually make a little little shelf up here to put the fan in the future I just find it circulates it around a little bit more you don't have to do that obviously the the heater itself you know it heats up the cabin really nicely but sometimes you just want to speed things along and push the warm air around so we'd have to figure something out for a long term for a fan above the heater well I hope you guys enjoyed today's video and learned a bit more about the Martin propane heater and what I like and what I don't like about it after having it for several months you have any questions don't hesitate to leave them down below I hope you guys have a great week as always take care [Music] you [Music]

Channel: TheWildYam

Views: 35,069

Rating: 4.8866668 out of 5

Keywords: martin propane heater, propane heater review, off grid heating, off grid ontario, off grid canada, ontario wilderness, tiny cabin, tiny cabin in the woods, thewildyam, wildyam, small hunt cabin, cabin heating solutions, cabin heating, off grid heating solution, small cabins, winter heating cabin, winter heating cottage, cottage, ontario cottage, cottaging

Id: SzmyOme3Ikg

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2019