Your Guide to Buying Unit Heaters
Is your garage or workspace bitterly cold? Maybe it's time for a unit heater.
What’s a Unit Heater?
Unit heaters, also known as garage heaters, are a powerful, yet compact way to heat a space. Unlike basic portable room heaters, unit heaters provide a permanent, and often more powerful, heating solution for your home or work space.
Entirely self-contained, unit heaters use a fan to blow air over a heat exchanger and supply warm air to a specific area in need of heat. In some large applications, you may find multiple unit heaters being used to increase coverage.
Unit heaters are available in a huge variety of sizes, fuels, and mounting options. This makes them perfect for nearly any single-room application that comes your way.
Most often you’ll find unit heaters providing heat in rooms that aren’t connected to the building’s central heating system and/or that have low insulation. Some common examples of unit heater applications are garages, greenhouses, workshops, warehouses, stores, and factories.
Choosing Your Unit Heater's Size
When shopping for a unit heater, be sure to select the right size for your application. If your heater is too small, you'll never reach your desired comfort level. If your heater is too big, you’ll likely experience large temperature swings and increase wear and tear on the heater as it cycles on and off too frequently.
Oversized and Oddly Shaped Spaces
No matter how hot the air is that your unit heater produces, it will only effectively heat the areas it can reach. Throw is a term that refers to the distance a unit heater can blow heated air, usually measured in feet. Before selecting a unit heater, make sure to compare its throw to the dimensions of your space.
If the space you're trying to heat is oddly shaped or oversized, you may get more effective coverage using multiple smaller heaters instead of one big heater. If you need help with sizing or designing your unit heater layout,