January and February were harsh months in Michigan, with temperatures regularly dropping near zero. They also happened to coincide with my decision to swap guts from one broken Jeep to another. Desperate to reduce my vehicle count to something more manageable, I invited my friend Dustin from Wisconsin to help me with the wrenching. It was grueling work, but it wasn’t so cold thanks to my garage’s small electric heater, which, I recently realized, burned away an absolutely absurd amount of my money.
Ever since I began writing about cars in 2015, I’ve taken pride in admitting my mistakes. They are oftentimes deeply foolish and embarrassing, but I have no shame, so why not share my idiocy with you, dear readers? If reading this spares even one of you the financial ruin I just suffered, then my mission is accomplished.
The image above shows me sitting on a rare 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee five-speed that I bought for $350. Unfortunately, the Jeep was missing its most important attribute: the stick shift. Luckily, my friend Dustin from Wisconsin had sold me his rusted-out manual ZJ for just $350 delivered, so I had donor parts ready to revive the red Jeep.
For three days straight, Dustin and I toiled. We had to tow both broken Jeeps into the garage, remove a transmission and transfer case, gut an entire interior, and deal with far too many rusty parts to even mention. (I documented our struggles in an article on Jalopnik a few months back). Since it was so cold outside — and since my landlord had asked me to make sure the pipes in the poorly-insulated garage don’t freeze — I had an electric heater turned on in the corner:
It’s tiny and doesn’t really shoot out a ton of heat, but it gets the garage to a comfortable 45 to 50ish degrees. Throw on a jacket, spin a few wrenches, and it’s enough to help me break a sweat.
I Wasted A Grand Because I’m A Fool
After Dustin and I had swapped the green Jeep’s transmission into the red Jeep, he headed back to Wisconsin, and I continued toiling on The Cheapest Car In America In 2009 (a cheap Nissan Versa) before driving the thing all the way down to Arkansas. From Arkansas I flew to LA for work, and a few days later I returned home and continued work on The Autopian, banging away on my keyboard all day for weeks.
One day, during a lunch break, I checked my bank account and saw an enormous withdrawal from my energy company. “What in the actual hell?” I thought. “I’ll look into this later.” The following day, I received this bill from my energy provider:
Holy mother of god.
FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE DOLLARS AND SEVENTY FIVE CENTS!
My heart began racing as I tried avoiding thinking about how many Jeep 4.0-liter engines I could buy for that amount. I logged into my DTE Energy account to look at my other bills, and that’s when I found the previous month’s statement, which I had somehow overlooked:
OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD.
SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX DOLLARS AND TWENTY THREE CENTS!
Oh no. Oh no.
That’s $1,182 for two months of electricity. I could literally buy eight used Jeep 4.0-liter engisfiewiodaiosfbasfbas [sorry, I fainted on my keyboard there for a sec].
To put this into context, the U.S. government’s “Energy Information Administration” lists the average monthly residential energy bill in Michigan as $109.86. And since I’m just a single dude living in a small shack, I’d guess that my bill should have been about $200 for two months, meaning my dumb ass wasted nearly a thousand dollars over over that span. One thousand dollars.
To understand what the heck happened, I looked at my energy usage, and saw that it spiked in February and March. Yes, you might expect to see a higher energy bill during these dark, cold months, but definitely not a 15-fold increase over a fall month (you can see that my average daily energy use jumped to 126.4 kWh; typically I use about 10 to 20 kWh).
Upon seeing this plot, I remembered my heater, and I sprinted as fast as I could to my garage to shut the damn thing off, as it was still blowing somewhat-warm air. Then I called up my energy company to better understand if this was indeed the cause of my now-inevitable bankruptcy.
“What I am seeing is a huge increase in usage during those two months,” the representative told me over the phone. “By any chance were you running any space heater or anything of that nature… or any sort of electric heat source?” she said immediately after, at which point I realized that maybe, just maybe, this whole stupid dilemma that I was now in was achingly obvious to most people, and that I was just an absolute cretin.
She then told me that her husband wrenches on cars, and experienced a similar shock when he saw what the electric space in their garage did to their energy bill. “Any sort of electric heat source…it quadruples your energy usage..it’s actually kinda shocking how much energy they use,” she told me, going on to suggest either routing my heater ducts from my house or using a kerosene space heater.
Let’s Crunch The Numbers
The heater in my garage is the King EKB2450TB, a 5,000 watt unit that runs on 240V of electricity. To convert the power output of that heater (which we’ll assume was going at full-bore: 5,000 watts) to energy, I have to multiply by time (Power = energy/time).
Given that I’m pretty sure the heater was on for the entirety of both billing periods — i.e. from January 12 until March 10 — I’m going to multiply 5,000 by 57 days in that period by 24 hours in each day to get 6.96 million watt hours, or 6,960 kWh. That’s roughly how much energy this heater should have used.
Let’s check this math real quick by looking at my overall energy usage, per my energy company:
According to my bills, I used 3,462 kWh between February 10 and March 10, and in the billing cycle before (January 12 to February 9) I used 3,462 kWh. Together that sums up to 5,840 kWh used in two months!
This is less than the 6,960 kWh that I just calculated my heater would use, so to understand this better, I dug into my energy data:
The data shows that the initial spike occurred on January 9. Then on February 10, it took a week long break — that’s the gap you see there between the two peaks. My energy usage spiked back up on February 17 and continued until March 7, when I apparently frantically turned my heater off.
From the start of my billing period, January 12, until February 10 (when I apparently turned the heater off) is a total of 29 days. From the start of the second spike, February 17 until its end, March 7, is 18 days. So the total amount of time my heater was on was probably 47 days.
So if we adjust the calculation I did earlier for my heater’s energy usage, it’s 5,000 watts times 47 days (instead of 57) times 24 hours a day. We end up with 5,640 kWh — that’s roughly how much energy I wasted during those billing periods solely on that heater.
That’s 200 kWh shy of the 5,840 kWh my energy company said I actually used over those billing periods. And as I said earlier, a typical household like mine would use about 100 kWh per month when not being an idiot with a space heater, so the math checks out. Electric space heaters are absolute guzzlers, and I wasted $1,000 to get a lukewarm garage for 47 days.
Natural Gas Is The Way To Heat Up Your Garage, Trust Me
Meanwhile, it only cost me $200.30 to heat my house — which is bigger than my garage and which I keep toasty at 72 degrees — during that same period. What it comes down to is that natural gas is just extremely cheap relative to the amount of energy it carries. I pay about $8.65 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas, which contains 1.037 million BTU (300 kWh) of energy. That’s about 3 cents per kWh compared to Michigan’s 16.26 cent average price per kWh of electricity .
As for Kerosene, which people commonly use in their garage space-heaters, that carries 131,890 BTU (38.65 kWh) per gallon, which — per the Energy Information Administration — costs about $2.65. So that’s about 7 cents per kWh — less than the 16.26 per kWh electricity rate.
Obviously my calculations don’t include losses, but these heaters are all fairly efficient, and that 16.26 number is so much more expensive than natural gas or Kerosene that it doesn’t affect my point, which is that gas is clearly a much more cost-effective way to heat your garage than electricity.
So don’t be a fool like me, a man who literally turned $1,000 into heat. I could have done exactly the same thing by simply lighting $1 bills on fire. Honestly, it might have been more cost-effective.
Update: Jason and I calculated that last statement, even though it was clearly hyperbolic (he forced me). According to a letter written on science website “Mad Science” by associate chemistry professor Todd Whitcombe, one dollar probably contains about 12.44 BTU of energy — or 0.0036 kWh. One thousand of those would give me at most 3.6 kWh of heat, which is obviously not the 5,840 I got from my electric heater. So I guess this whole debacle isn’t so bad when you compare it to literally burning currency…
Some self-regulated heat tape under pipe insulation on the pipes would be the cheapest way to prevent freezing. That’s what the landlord should install.
For heat in my garage, I just use a propane heater that screws to the top of a propane tank as needed, but my garage is poorly sealed and about 900 sqft, so there’s little chance of not getting enough oxygen. It takes the chill off. I’ve often looked at Marketplace for an old wood stove or something like that. That’s the ultimate goal for me – wood heat and just make a fire when I need to warm up the garage to do some work in the winter.
A ~9k btu Mr Buddy propane heater is around $130 ( well, was in the before-times: no idea now ), and the local Northwest Hardware refills tanks for $2.99 / gal on Sundays. A half-decent CO detector was about $40 a few years back.
I gave up on kerosene a decade back due to the smell and lack of safeties. Ymmv.
Insulation and a 1&1/2ton mini-split heat-pump would be optimal, but you’re renting.
Just be careful of combustion sources, and especially Carbon Monoxide!
I am pretty sure everyone who lives in a place that has legit winters has learned the electric space heater lesson at least once.
In Finland we have this thing called “insulation”. Might want to look that thing up if you want to make warm space up in cold climate. It’s a bit like not trying to keep warm by peeing your pants.
We’ve got it too, but it’s often expensive to add after the fact, and while there are a few government incentives, they don’t add up to much. So adding insulation can be a high cost situation. Yes, there’s a return, but it can be long.
I know you got it, it was supposed to be a joke.
Still with these energy prices 1k in insulation it will pay itself back. Not only it will decrease the cost + add more comfort. Also during summer it’s easier to keep the place cool. Personally I would use heatpump for both.
Heat pumps are finally starting to catch on in North America. Still in the early stages, but we are getting there.
But for reference, I just replaced my gas furnace with another gas furnace about two months ago, because the gas furnace was cheaper, install was cheaper, and natural gas despite being currently high is still pretty cheap, so the ROI of a heat pump was 15-20 years, which is how long a natural gas furnace is supposed to last. I suspect most of the high costs were due to limited choices of installers and brands in my area.
Now if I were on propane or electric, a heat pump would have actually be a pretty cost effective solution.
Heat pumps have been around for a while in the US. The house my dad had built in 1973 used a heat pump.
They’ve been around, but they certainly haven’t been popular. Well, I mean, if you ignore that AC is a heat pump…
But in something like David’s garage, it would be cheap to add insulation and something that he could do over a weekend or two.
I know you have a rental home, but if you can put a small wood burning stove in there. One of those kits that change a 55 gallon steel drum into a stove is pretty cheap.
Well, you have a nice collection of iron oxide already, just grind down some aluminium scrap parts and you have all the ingredients for thermite. Lots of free heat!
The other option (if you have room) is to leave enough space for a second car. Pull in with a fully warmed up car/truck and the engine cooling off will provide lots of heat into the garage.
Honestly…. guys…. those chinese diesel heaters KICK ASS. I just installed one in my van. They literally sip electricity and a 10l tank of diesel would last for freakin ever, and they’re like $110. I was going to heat my detached garage with natural gas but the cost of trenching and getting it connected is $1000s of the dollars. I think I’m just going to throw in a diesel heater instead. They work great.
Late to the party, but you may have dodged a bullet.
Lpg space haters have a snag which goes thus,
C3H8 + 5 O2 -> 3 CO2 + 4 H2O
3 molecules of propane plus 5 molecules of oxygen from the air yields 3 molecules of carbon dioxide and 4 molecules of water. Plus HEAT!
44 pounds of propane burn to form 9 gallons of water.
So just 5 pounds of propane results in one gallon of water somewhere in your garage.
The water comes out as vapor because it’s so hot, but in your garage, which is cold,the moisture laden warm air cools off and water falls out on your floor (and your stationary tools, your toolbox and lots of other things you don’t want to get wet and rusty.
( yes I pinched the chemistry bit)
So, direct propane is not the answer. Properly ducted, well insulated ………………Oh sod it, a man who knows about heating and cooling cars?
Please tidy up your garage.
For $1k you should just leave the door to your garage open and let the house heater heat up the garage.
Agreed.
I bought one of those small propane heaters that are used for camping/hunting and for $3.50/bottle I can get the garage nice and cozy without the significant expense. Or, maybe you should think about living a bit further south, like in TX where you have to worry about cooling your garage instead of heating it.
“So I guess this whole debacle isn’t so bad when you compare it to literally burning currency…”
How does it compare to burning carb cleaner?
Good ideas here, if you owned the house.
Since you rent, you’re only responsible for heat when you work in there. The pipes are your landlord’s responsibility. If they burst, he pays to fix them.
He installed the electric heater in an uninsulated space, and told you to not let the pipes freeze? Right, he doesn’t pay the bill.
He could either pay or reimburse you to install insulation. Then use a thermostat on the heater to keep it at a minimum temperature.
Better yet would be that he pays or reimburses you to install actual wire heating wrap, with thermostats, that goes around the pipes, with pipe insulation, and uses a pretty low amount of power.
Then, you only run the big heater when you work.
Those pipe wires are not cheap either.
I added an electric 240 VAC heater to my garage a few years ago to keep it from freezing when the kerosene heater wasn’t running. Electric spiked some but not that much. The big issue was, we went away for the weekend, and came home to a garage that had burnt to the ground because the electric heater shorted out, causing a fire. According to the fire investigator anyways. I still have other thoughts on the matter, but I no longer even live in that state, so it’s all moot.
DT: Did you intentionally leave the heater on ? Or did you forget that you left it on?
I just didn’t think it was a big deal.
How? 5 kW is a lot, my sauna has a smaller heater.
Having no shame and admitting your fuck ups is a big part of why you’re such a fantastic auto journalist!
I have an electric baseboard in the insulated garage with insulated door. Main heat source was a propane sunflower, That took a long time to heat a large two car garage up. Floor is the main source of cold. This winter I broke out the bigger dog heater. Which is just an aluminun box with raw flame inside it. On a cold day though it would go thru almost 10lbs of propane
I would not trust an open flame in Davids garage though.
I know space heaters are quite costly, but wow, that is out of site. I used one for a hot minute when I really needed to work in the garage when it was 20 degrees in there. I am glad that I didn’t leave it running!
I am probably going to grab a torpedo heater for next winter. Smelly, but effective, like myself.
I like the comparison to how many Jeep parts that money would buy but where’s the comparison for how much heat you could have generated by just burning actual Jeep’s? Surely a $350 Jeep carcass would heat a space quite well.
No one is going to comment that this appears to be a massive fire hazard?? I am genuinely surprised you didn’t burn your house down. That would have cost more than $1,182.
Incidentally, as an ex-Michigander (and former resident of several other frozen hellscapes in the upper midwest), I’d recommend moving south. After living in Georgia for the past several years, I now think of 45 degrees as a cold day.
Been there too! 1100€ of electric bill because of an old heater! The older they are the more they consume. Older appliances including refrigerators and washing machines should be traded every five years because they are more economical when new and also because the power prices have risen greatly. Get yourself a good old wood burner!
Normal space heaters like this haven’t changed in efficiency since they first came out. 5KW of electricity in, 5KW of heat out.
Heat pumps will do something like 2-4x better most of the time, but they’re still pricey enough it might have been a wash overall.
Have you given any thought what the electricity cost increase for your EV truck project will be for charging?
Unless he’s driving about 400 miles a day every day for two months, it’ll be cheaper than the space heater.
Makes me wonder if EV chargers automatically turn off when the battery is charged? Other wise like this don’t drive but leave on and connected same cost. But I don’t know if the charger keeps running or not educate me.
The charger brains might draw a few cents per day, but without a spot to put all those kw, it is impossible to pull them from the wall
Holy Crap! You’re paying .06611 / Kwh?
Just checked, I pay .02271 / Kwh.
Man I’m glad I don’t live in Michigan!
Here in SF bay area, we are paying $0.31465 / kWh, and that’s for the lowest tier.
I don’t want to thumb up 31.5 cents a kwh but I appreciate knowing that’s the rate. My God. Seriously? Left San Jose in 89 for Denver and never looked back.
I see the rate now in Denver is .135 / kwh. I left Denver and moved south so getting out or Xcel Energy’s web was a good thing.
.083/kWh here in Tennessee. But with all the fees, that jumps to .112kwh for last month.
Up in Humboldt County our lowest tier is $0.34387/kWh. We also have the highest gas prices in the lower 48.
CORRECTION – because there’s no edit feature – My rate is 9 cents/kwh. I misread the bill. The .02271 is part of it for something about which I have no idea.
So I’m actually paying more than David but my overall bill for 871 kwh last month is $124 so the difference has to be in the fees and charges they pound on top.
Renting a garage is the toughest. I doubt your landlord will cough up the dough to have a gas line run to the garage for a proper heater, and doubt he/she will invest in insulating it properly.. Would they consent to a pellet or wood stove? That could be a compromise.
I too love in an area where electric is insanely expensive, when compared to natural gas. My father-out-law has the opposite. His electric is crazy cheap and natural gas too expensive not consider. Location, location, location.
I live in California so it doesn’t get that cold in the winter. maybe 50-55 degrees at night, which is chilly enough at night in the garage. I have two large sized Kerosun kerosene heaters. These things really throw out the heat. I can just sit one near by the bench, fire it up and I am taking off the sweater in 5 minutes. A 5 gallon container of kerosene is about $40 here and lasts me about 2-3 months. I would suggest you invest in one. The ones they make today burn clean and don’t stink.
If his garage would stay at 50-55F without heat, David wouldn’t have a problem. Hell, I’m in the upper midwest too, and keep my house at 55F in the winter. If I’m cold I can always put on more clothes. It’s when I’m sweating and sweltering that I can’t stand it, and there are limits to how much clothing you can remove.
Ya still should have a CO detector, though.
As an HVAC tech who spends his days on various roofs, I always say, ‘You can always layer on more clothes, but there ain’t but so much clothing you can shed with out vicious laughter—or arrest!’
Little HotHands packets tucked in the back of your gloves help with the inevitable numb fingers-important to a former mid-westerner who had frostbite as a kid. Numb fingers poking around live voltage is rather scary.
And there are those that say we should be abandoning all our gas appliances and furnaces for electric. Sure. Great idea.
Sure is a pity that heat pumps don’t exist.
Resistance heat is the devil My house is all electric and I might touch $200 in the dead of winter (Ohio). Ground source heat pump in house, 2 electric radiators in 2.5 car detached garage + baseboard heating when I’m out there. Also mining crypto on a PC in the house.