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I'm tidying up my garage to have an indoor trainer in there rather than just bike storage and a bit of spannering.
Currently use a cheap fan heater just to take the chill off but it takes a while to warm the room up.
I'd like an IR panel but have realised that a wall mounted panel should be 1.2m from the floor (I have a fold down 8x4 workbench on the only empty wall so it would have to be much lower) and my ceiling is only about 20cm above my head so I think a ceiling panel would result in a hot head and cold feet/body.
Which brings me to portable heaters, I noticed there are several freestanding 'pillar' style patio heaters (about a meter tall) that could be moved around to wherever I'm working but also on the odd occasion be used on the patio when we've eaten outside and started getting cold before we've finished. These are 'open element ' orange heaters behind a grill, they are generally higher output than the panel heaters but is there any other advantage to them compared to a portable IR panel that sits on feet?
Short wave IR (element) are more for outdoors, I suspect it would be uncomfortable indoors as hot at close range.
That's useful, thanks. I was trying to find out if the element style was short wave aka near wave but I had poor internet earlier!
I'm not going to want to heat the garage for long periods so it might still be the best option, I remember the bathroom wall heaters you used to see are the same type.
I use one of these to warm me up whilst the oil fired radiator comes up to temp and then switch the infra red heater off and the radiator thermostat takes over.
Yeh I think it's going to come down to either the pedestal type or the pillar type like this. Tall pedestal might be better as I've recently got the click together garage flooring and I don't think it does too well under direct heat so something higher would heat it over a larger area and less likely to make it expand unevenly...
When my heating stopped working (user error) I got a £25 B&Q halogen style one which worked well (I thought) as you could aim it at a person (cold GF) rather than wait for it to heat up all the air in the room.
gtech.co.uk have wall mounted ones on offer for £29.99 instead of £129.99, wall mounted and fully weatherproof, might be worth a look?
are these halogen heaters real infrared? i saw one like @wheelsonfire posted but have no idea if theyre ok for indoors.
convection seems the way to go, heat the person, not the room
i didnt read that 1.2m is minimum height for IR panels, ive looked at diy infrared saunas but more interested in 250w ir bulbs. with a reflector/clamp at £20each and bulbs from £7ea. some designs use wood as a mounting board so i'll start with that and add reflectors later when i decide on the design.
the bulbs i got are dimmable and dont need to be far from the floor afaik