garage ceiling forced air heater 120 volt

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Stevenfyeager

Senior Member
Location
United States, Indiana
Occupation
electrical contractor
Customer wants a garage ceiling forced air heater but only has a dedicated 120 volt circuit available. Most are 240v but I thought I had found one on line earlier on. I can't find it now. Do you know any ? Thank you.
 
Doubt if you will find one with enough wattage to heat a garage with a 120 volt supply. Someone needs to do the calculation to determine how much wattage is needed.
 
By "dedicated 120 volt circuit" I assume that's at most a 120V / 20A circuit. UL regs will limit any 120V heaters to 1500 watts. 1500 watts is 5K BTU's; that's just physics and can't be changed. I'd tell him to just buy a plug in heater at a hardware store and if that's not enough to heat his space he's gonna need to go bigger. I've found that ceiling mount 5KW heaters that run on a 240V 30A circuit do a decent job heating garages.
 
BarryO said:
By "dedicated 120 volt circuit" I assume that's at most a 120V / 20A circuit. UL regs will limit any 120V heaters to 1500 watts. 1500 watts is 5K BTU's; that's just physics and can't be changed. I'd tell him to just buy a plug in heater at a hardware store and if that's not enough to heat his space he's gonna need to go bigger. I've found that ceiling mount 5KW heaters that run on a 240V 30A circuit do a decent job heating garages.
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Yes, they do. Mine keeps a 2 car garage from freezing even at -20F. Insulated and rocked.
 
masterinbama said:
How dedicated is the 120 volt circuit? Can it be changed to a dedicated 240 volt circuit?
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agree.
If it's a 120v circuit with other items connected then 210.23 is going to severely limit the load you can add.
If's a truly "dedicated" to this heater it should be easy to change the supply over to 240v at the panel.
 
augie47 said:
agree.
If it's a 120v circuit with other items connected then 210.23 is going to severely limit the load you can add.
If's a truly "dedicated" to this heater it should be easy to change the supply over to 240v at the panel.
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We've probably all seen how that was remedied at some time or another. I won't go into details for fear someone will take it as a recommended solution.
 
augie47 said:
agree.
If it's a 120v circuit with other items connected then 210.23 is going to severely limit the load you can add.
If's a truly "dedicated" to this heater it should be easy to change the supply over to 240v at the panel.
Click to expand...
Thank you, yes, I did finally find one 240 v 2 kw heater, and may recommend it to him. (over $700; REZNOR EGW-2) I found only one 240 v that low in watts, he doesn't have many amps to work with in his garage, certainly not enough for a 30 amp one.
 
The one garage I did was a 5kw heater. The customer put that in because the bedroom floors over the garage were always cold and they would get some frozen pipes in the garage ceiling feeding the bathroom upstairs
 
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