RV Heating: five different ways including Mr. Heater Big Buddy heater and "Candle" style heater

it's a miserable day outside so I thought I would take this opportunity to do some videos about the different ways I can heat the inside of my travel trailer what you're looking at right now is the Coleman portable catalytic heater it operates off a one-pound propane bottle that you can find anywhere it's equipped with a fan in it and it works pretty good what I'm going to do is just to kind of give you a sense of the performance of it I'm going to light it up and right now it's 63 degrees in here I actually have the probe located in the middle of the camper so we're not getting the heat right off with the heater itself and then in a little bit I'll come back and we'll see how it's going this is actually pretty simple to turn on you just turn it to the on position and hit the igniter button I'm going to face it away from my couch I'm not igniting my couch and it's done it's pretty much a one-step operation you just it's either on or off and it's a pretty simple safe to use inside as long as you're using a propane bottle and we'll come back in about an hour and we'll see how what the difference is inside here all right it's been an hour since I turn this heater on you can see it's got a nice rosy glow as normal for this unit it's it feels quite a bit warmer in here the unit puts out radiant heat and you can really feel it on your skin but when you look at the temperature it's 66 so it only went up I think 3 degrees in the last hour and what I'm going to do is shut it down and bring my next heater in I actually weighed the bottle of propane before I put it in the heater and it weighed one pound fourteen point three ounces at the start and now it weighs one pound eleven point eight ounces so it used about three ounces in one hours time out of a one pound bottle the Coleman here was a 3,000 BTU unit and it just had that one on/off with your choice of temperature settings this is the mr. heater big buddy it holds two propane one pound propane bottles or you can hook it up to an external source with a quick disconnect and there's some accessories that make that a lot easier this unit has two burners on it which allows you to change the difference to get to two different temperature settings the low is just one of the burner plates and then the medium is the same burner plate but more fuel going to it and then the high is both a catalytic plates are lit up the unit is four thousand nine thousand and eighteen thousand BTUs at those three settings so even at the low setting this heater is 33% more generating 33% more heat so we should see a much larger performance difference open the door to air out the camper a little bit and I really care for the smell you get with the propane heating and also wanted to get the temperature back down to 63 so we would be kind of starting from a level playing field so what I'm going to do is turn it on I already got the pilot light lit this actually turns out a little bit easier than that other unit does and I'm just going to set it to low and run it like that I've used this heater to heat a house up with and and I'm going to tell you right away this thing it gets really hot so the camper area that we're I'm in right now is about 15 by 8 I got the front and back sections closed off so I'm just heating the the center part and this thing will just cook me right out of here I guess what I'm going to do I'll turn it on high just so you can see what happens that's medium right there so the one side gets quite a bit hotter and now both sides are lit all right I'm going to sit her back down to low and we'll come back an hour and see where we're at all right there's just a couple minutes left before the hour is up and it is hot in here one big difference between the Coleman and the mr. heater is the Coleman it's quite a bit noisier while it burns I don't know if that was audible during the video but the mr. heater is really silent it makes a little bit more noise if you go to the full burn on it but I mean it's it's actually silent at the moment in about 10 minutes it had ratcheted right up to 72 degrees then for some reason it kind of leveled off it's 73 degrees in here right now and it feels really hot one of the byproducts of heating with propane is your windows will fog up because water is the byproduct of the combustion process when you use propane so that's a bit of a bummer and it feels real wet it feels very humid in here I did a little research while I was filming that and the mr. buddy here is supposed to her I'm sorry mr. heater big buddy is supposed to work with a on one cylinder one and a half to six hours with two cylinders three to twelve hours and then if you get two propane cylinders it's 50 to 200 20 hours and ideally what I'd like to do is get this hooked up to my main system and then I wouldn't have to change the cylinders out in it because you can't have the 20 pound cylinder inside the living area if you're going to use it that way all right after one hour of burn we're at 1.81 ounces so we went through pretty much five ounces of propane in the last hour if you look at the bottle it's really frosty but that's that's what happens now look like that when you use them one thing I may have done to skew the results a little bit is that the mr. buddy holds or mr. heater holds two propane bottles and I know the bottle on the other side was empty and I suspect that a portion of the propane from this bottle cross connected into that bottle was probably filling it up at the same time it was burning so this is probably not an accurate result but I'm also not that interested in repeating the process just to get a a real result I would probably go along the lines with it's pretty close to what mr. buddy or mr. heater is suggesting the burn times are maybe not quite as good as that and see 5 ounces yeah you're not going to get anywhere near because the I did the math was actually two and a half ounces that the Coleman used and that was going to give you about a 6-hour burn time so this is really going to be about three hours on one bottle but once again it that may not be 100% accurate because it could have been filling the other bottle this is a another way of manufacturing some heat in your recreational vehicle this I would use this only as kind of a last-ditch method its life sure it's safe because you're running your stove top you got to open flame and that's going to consume air and you're going to have more co2 being emitted but it's worth mentioning because you see it out there a lot and I just wanted to go over it as a possibility and it's actually not a really good one what I have here is just the large pot with a bolt coming up through the center and a washer on it and then I just put the smaller pot on the inside with another washer and basically what that's going to do is just create a more mass to hold and re-radiate heat basically what's going to happen is I'm going to put this on top of the stove and turn the flame on the stove and it's just going to convert it from the it's going to create more warming heat because it's going to take the flame and turn it into a radiant heat energy and that's what's going to heat up the space I've conducted this experiment two different ways one is I've put candles in here and I ran out of candles but basically you can put those little emergency tea light candles down there I can fit four or five underneath there and if you do that many it will make it a little warm but not hard they won't it won't really heat up the space at all you'll just feel a little bit of heat coming off with a pot if you get real close to it and then basically you just put the candles under there and then put the pot on top and that's going to heat up the bad news is those tea candles only last about an hour so it's not really a super economical or efficient because you've always got to replace those candles and then the way I'm going to demonstrate for the experiment is I have my burner I just put the pot on top and like the burner and run that alright what I've done is we just got the burner lit it's at its lowest possible setting I have the fan right behind there once the pot heats up turn this battery-powered fan on and it helps disperse to heat a little more evenly so I'm just going to go ahead and put the pot on and let it run for an hour the temperature here is 66 degrees I didn't go all the way down to 63 because I just know that this is not going to do near as well as those other two Isis and I don't want to freeze so we'll check back in a little bit just for a little bit of fun I decided to go ahead and put the temperature probe on top of the pot just to get an idea of what kind of temperatures it's producing and you can see it's 207 degrees and that's the heat coming off the ceramic you don't actually really feel it that much you get your hand close and you can start to feel it a little bit but that's at the lowest setting I've actually had this on and had the burner turned up a little bit more and it can get pretty toasty but I don't think that it's terribly efficient to do that so inhale let this go for the rest of the hour and we'll see where we're at temperature-wise inside okay it's up to 212 Oh back down to 210 so that pots still warming up okay so it's been an hour and it's actually warmed up a little bit in here even at the lowest setting I got my probe in the same spot it was for the other two and let's see if you can see that or not it's 72 degrees in here and I think it was 66 when we started out so it's actually a little bit better than I thought it was going to be but I've got to say I'm not really I don't think this is really something that you want to do plus I think if you read your stove instructions they'd tell you specifically not to do this but if you were cold and you needed some heat you had two flower pots and a bolt you'd be ready to go this camera camper came equipped with the AC package and a heater and they work really good the heaters Canon always because the fan is just crazy loud the only thing is it requires electricity to operate so if you don't have a decent battery bank and you're running the furnace lot it's going to eat your battery down pretty quick and it also uses a lot of propane if I'm plugged in somewhere my preferred method of heating would be the electric heater big advantages you don't have to monitor it you're not going you don't have to worry about carbon monoxide or running out of fuel if you're plugged into Shore power you're good to go of course if you're out boondocking or dry camping somewhere this is not a real good option because you'd have to either run a generator noisy or have just an enormous amount of batteries to operate something like this with a nut because this this does like electricity and it will really go through a set of batteries in no time but if you're plugged in if you're able to plug in somewhere this is really the best because you can set the temperature and it's just like heating your house okay just to do a little summary I think the thing that I'd liked the best about any of these heaters

Channel: Garage Kitchen of Science

Views: 493,808

Rating: 4.5716982 out of 5

Keywords: rv, rv heating, clay pot heating, candle heater, kandle heeter, mr heater, big buddy, colman, colman heater, propane heater, electric heater, Recreational Vehicle (Industry), Random

Id: Iz7qi3VqK9A

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 16 2014