During the winter months I use my Buddy Heater quite a bit when doing projects in the garage. It’s a great little propane heater that is safe to use indoors and puts off some serious heat. Unfortunately a vast majority of the heat goes straight up. So to counter that I will sometimes plug in a little desk fan in front of it to push some of that hot air around. It tends to work pretty well.
How could I get this heat to circulate better, making this propane heater a little more efficient without any additional power source?
I ran across a video of someone using a thermal fan for his Buddy Heater. Wait… what?!?… People use these on top of their wood burning stoves to help circulate the warm air. I had no idea these things even existed. Lol. What an amazing idea. So I picked up a double fan here, now you can buy a single fan but why… when you can get a double fan?
With fan in hand, I had to brainstorm up a way to mount it to the Buddy Heater. Something easily installed and removed yet sturdy enough where the fan won’t just fall off if bumped. Instead of wondering to the hardware store, I dug around in my mess looking for any scrap pieces of metal I could use to make a mount. I think I can make a little something with this 1 inch square tubing…
I first cut it in half
Then I used a cutting wheel on my Milwaukee grinder to cut a slit down the middle
The idea I had was that the square tubing would slide over the ends of the fan base securing the fan. Then the square tubing would be slide over a bar of the protective cage. But…
The cut I put in the tubing wasn’t big enough for the fan or the bar. So I swapped from a cutting wheel to a grinding wheel
This should make the cut wide enough but not too wide… I hope.
Perfect fit
With both pieces of square tubing cut to fit the fan and bar of the protective cage, I needed a way to hold them at the perfect width. Time to do some more scavenging around the garage. Look at that, a little piece of 1 inch angled steel. I will use this to cap the ends of the tubing and secure them at the correct width.
After a little bit of welding…
I ended up with a mounting bracket that looked like this…
Now, the fan will slide into the bracket…
Then the whole thing can be slid on the top bar of the protective cage
Doesn’t look too bad…
I started with the heater on low and it took a little over a minute to get the blades turning. I left it there for 5 minutes or so but the fans didn’t seem to be turning very fast. I didn’t want to damage it by overheating the base so I looked into the instructions to see the optimal temp for these fans to run. 482 degrees Fahrenheit is optimal but don’t exceed 662 Fahrenheit.
With the provided thermometer I did some temperature checks with the Buddy Heater on High. I slid a piece of 1/8 inch flat bar in the square tubing and stuck the thermometer on it. It’s gonna take a little bit for the steel to heat up to max temp. I left it for about 10 minutes and the temperature never got over 450 Fahrenheit.
Now I know that I won’t damage the fan if the Buddy Heater is on high, that’s a relief. Now it’s time to play with it a bit. Starting the heater on high, it took 42 seconds to get the fans moving. After 1 minute 10 seconds you could feel the fans moving the air and hear them spinning.
I then backed off the heater to medium and it didn’t seem to change the speed of the fans. One thing I did notice was that I was still losing heat up from behind the fans. I’m thinking that the fans need to be slid back a bit. Maybe the heat is a little more intense toward the back of the heating surface? I’m going to keep messing with the placement of the fans and I may end up building another mount for them. Well not bad for the first prototype made from scrap metal in the garage.
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