Thread: New heater install for the workshop.

I’ve just set up my new workshop heater. Previously I was using a kero heater, but apparently it was smelly, not that I could tell, that’s why I tell everyone ‘my $#!t don’t stink’. Funnily enough, the wife disagrees! The new heater is called a parking heater for some reason, and are very popular with the caravaning crowd. These heaters are very cheap at $Aust89 on ebay and cheap to run using as little as .1 litres an hour. Of course if you want to buy one in country, you can probably quadruple that price, happy in the knowledge you bought it in country and it will have a nice English brand name.


They come in three forms: A tall all in one with integral fuel tank, a squat all in one also with integral fuel tank and a unit designed to have the fuel tank and heater unit installed separately. I bought the tall, all in one.


The very first thing you must do when setting these things up, and this is gospel, grab the instruction booklet and throw it in the bin, then go to you tube and look for a video on how to set the parking heater up, there are quite a few. The Chinglish instruction booklet is the worst I’ve ever come across, simply does not make sense, and the bits you can understand are wrong: ‘only on the status is off’. Is a great example!


The unit comes with everything you need to install it, exhaust pipe, muffler, air inlet pipe, filter, clamps, screws, plus a short section of largish tube to direct the heated air. Plus a remote, but you’ll need to supply a power supply, either a battery with charger or a dedicated power supply which I’ve used. You need 10 amps at least for startup, once started the power usage is negligible. Both inlet and exhaust pipes exit the unit from underneath, but the two legs, back and front, are not high enough to allow that, so I’ve fastened the legs to some thickish timber. The exhaust is fixed to the timber via supplied brackets on the right hand side and the inlet filter fastened to the timber on the left side of the timber, again using the supplied brackets. I’ve cut a 25mm hole in the workshop wall for the muffler to exit.


The fuel tank holds five litres of diesel, but apparently you can use kero, old engine oil, canola, kerosene, although these fuels may not work as well as diesel. Usage varies from .1 to .5 litres per hour according to the ebay advertisement. It does make some noise from the exhaust pipe, but that’s outside the workshop so it can’t heard inside, fan noise is negligible unless cranked up high.


The unit has various settings: Timer function, time, temperature, fan speed, thermostat and so on. I’ve set mine to 24degrees C, but I have absolutely no idea how I did that. I also managed to set the time and pair it with the remote, again, no idea how I managed to set them either, but the rest; nope, nope and nope, no bloody idea.


It’s not cold enough to use at this time of year yet, but I did test it out after setting it up. It works extremely well, on it’s lowest fan speed it warmed up my small 4.2m x 4.8 m shed in a matter of minutes. Crank up the temperature and fan speed and it gets decidedly hot in the workshop, so would probably also suit a much larger workshop.