Ever since I began writing about cars in 2015, I’ve taken pride in admitting my mistakes. They are oftentimes deeply foolish and embarrassing, but I have no shame, so why not share my idiocy with you, dear readers? If reading this spares even one of you the financial ruin I just suffered, then my mission is accomplished.
The image above shows me sitting on a rare 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee five-speed that I bought for $350. Unfortunately, the Jeep was missing its most important attribute: the stick shift. Luckily, my friend Dustin from Wisconsin had sold me his rusted-out manual ZJ for just $350 delivered, so I had donor parts ready to revive the red Jeep. For three days straight, Dustin and I toiled. We had to tow both broken Jeeps into the garage, remove a transmission and transfer case, gut an entire interior, and deal with far too many rusty parts to even mention. (I documented our struggles in an article on Jalopnik a few months back). Since it was so cold outside — and since my landlord had asked me to make sure the pipes in the poorly-insulated garage don’t freeze — I had an electric heater turned on in the corner:
It’s tiny and doesn’t really shoot out a ton of heat, but it gets the garage to a comfortable 45 to 50ish degrees. Throw on a jacket, spin a few wrenches, and it’s enough to help me break a sweat.
I Wasted A Grand Because I’m A Fool
After Dustin and I had swapped the green Jeep’s transmission into the red Jeep, he headed back to Wisconsin, and I continued toiling on The Cheapest Car In America In 2009 (a cheap Nissan Versa) before driving the thing all the way down to Arkansas. From Arkansas I flew to LA for work, and a few days later I returned home and continued work on The Autopian, banging away on my keyboard all day for weeks. One day, during a lunch break, I checked my bank account and saw an enormous withdrawal from my energy company. “What in the actual hell?” I thought. “I’ll look into this later.” The following day, I received this bill from my energy provider:
Holy mother of god. FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE DOLLARS AND SEVENTY FIVE CENTS! My heart began racing as I tried avoiding thinking about how many Jeep 4.0-liter engines I could buy for that amount. I logged into my DTE Energy account to look at my other bills, and that’s when I found the previous month’s statement, which I had somehow overlooked:
OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD. SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX DOLLARS AND TWENTY THREE CENTS! Oh no. Oh no. That’s $1,182 for two months of electricity. I could literally buy eight used Jeep 4.0-liter engisfiewiodaiosfbasfbas [sorry, I fainted on my keyboard there for a sec]. To put this into context, the U.S. government’s “Energy Information Administration” lists the average monthly residential energy bill in Michigan as $109.86. And since I’m just a single dude living in a small shack, I’d guess that my bill should have been about $200 for two months, meaning my dumb ass wasted nearly a thousand dollars over over that span. One thousand dollars. Upon seeing this plot, I remembered my heater, and I sprinted as fast as I could to my garage to shut the damn thing off, as it was still blowing somewhat-warm air. Then I called up my energy company to better understand if this was indeed the cause of my now-inevitable bankruptcy. “What I am seeing is a huge increase in usage during those two months,” the representative told me over the phone. “By any chance were you running any space heater or anything of that nature… or any sort of electric heat source?” she said immediately after, at which point I realized that maybe, just maybe, this whole stupid dilemma that I was now in was achingly obvious to most people, and that I was just an absolute cretin. She then told me that her husband wrenches on cars, and experienced a similar shock when he saw what the electric space in their garage did to their energy bill. “Any sort of electric heat source…it quadruples your energy usage..it’s actually kinda shocking how much energy they use,” she told me, going on to suggest either routing my heater ducts from my house or using a kerosene space heater.
Let’s Crunch The Numbers
The heater in my garage is the King EKB2450TB, a 5,000 watt unit that runs on 240V of electricity. To convert the power output of that heater (which we’ll assume was going at full-bore: 5,000 watts) to energy, I have to multiply by time (Power = energy/time). Let’s check this math real quick by looking at my overall energy usage, per my energy company:
According to my bills, I used 3,462 kWh between February 10 and March 10, and in the billing cycle before (January 12 to February 9) I used 3,462 kWh. Together that sums up to 5,840 kWh used in two months! This is less than the 6,960 kWh that I just calculated my heater would use, so to understand this better, I dug into my energy data:
The data shows that the initial spike occurred on January 9. Then on February 10, it took a week long break — that’s the gap you see there between the two peaks. My energy usage spiked back up on February 17 and continued until March 7, when I apparently frantically turned my heater off. From the start of my billing period, January 12, until February 10 (when I apparently turned the heater off) is a total of 29 days. From the start of the second spike, February 17 until its end, March 7, is 18 days. So the total amount of time my heater was on was probably 47 days. So if we adjust the calculation I did earlier for my heater’s energy usage, it’s 5,000 watts times 47 days (instead of 57) times 24 hours a day. We end up with 5,640 kWh — that’s roughly how much energy I wasted during those billing periods solely on that heater. That’s 200 kWh shy of the 5,840 kWh my energy company said I actually used over those billing periods. And as I said earlier, a typical household like mine would use about 100 kWh per month when not being an idiot with a space heater, so the math checks out. Electric space heaters are absolute guzzlers, and I wasted $1,000 to get a lukewarm garage for 47 days.
Natural Gas Is The Way To Heat Up Your Garage, Trust Me
As for Kerosene, which people commonly use in their garage space-heaters, that carries 131,890 BTU (38.65 kWh) per gallon, which — per the Energy Information Administration — costs about $2.65. So that’s about 7 cents per kWh — less than the 16.26 per kWh electricity rate. Obviously my calculations don’t include losses, but these heaters are all fairly efficient, and that 16.26 number is so much more expensive than natural gas or Kerosene that it doesn’t affect my point, which is that gas is clearly a much more cost-effective way to heat your garage than electricity. So don’t be a fool like me, a man who literally turned $1,000 into heat. I could have done exactly the same thing by simply lighting $1 bills on fire. Honestly, it might have been more cost-effective. But I do feel your pain – my big garage in Maine has a Monitor kerosene heater – and while the garage is very well insulated, it is also 1450sq/ft. I figured ~$10/day to heat it when I am wrenching up there in the winter – when K1 was half the price it is now. So if I ran it all winter that would add up to big money too. They are pricey for the install but the mitsubishi come with a 15 yr warranty. You can also DIY (but you lose the warranty). Get the Mitsubishi Hyper Heat ones which heat down to -14F. Encouraging people to heat with Natural gas in today’s environment is socially irresponsible and with prices for Natural Gas skyrocketing it’s not going to be that much cheaper than heat pumps over the long term. And my garage is just as messy as yours, but with kids stuff and yard tools. I would say that you should do a Marie Kondo and get rid of stuff that doesn’t spark joy, but you find joy in old Jeep parts, so the point is moot. Now organizing these things might help…… Dude – get your free Nest from DTE and have that shit automatically turned down overnight and while you are gone! You’re a cheap bastard, but you haven’t achieved cheap NORTHERN bastard status yet – 68ish during the day, 64 or lower at night. Blankets are cheap after all. I feel your pain… Second – if you’re going to switch to Kerosene, be prepared for everything to smell. 2 years ago, I had to change out a fuel pump on my old truck and let it sit in a closed garage for a day with a kerosene torpedo heater. Granted – attached garage, but my entire house, car, all of my car washing towels ALL smelled of kerosene for weeks. Thousand years from now, some neo-archeologist will search this site and presume it was a repository for an eccentric collector of specialized vehicular rubbish. Then, she will be absolutely stunned as to why it was housed inside 4 rudimentary walls while multiple rusted skeltalized heaps were found in the surrounding yard. Like any archeological site, she will just presume that it was all for religious/spiritual purposes to worship some unknown Rust god. Would this be worth it? Could be, especially if there was any chance of the power going out for a long time especially during extreme climatic events. If unable to replace the garage door for better insulation to lower heating, monitor winter temps inside the garage and adjust the heater for minimum heat to keep pipes from freezing. Adding foam insulation to the garage doors can help as well as checking weather stripping around the doors. All work can help lower electrical use of that 5kw heater. I’ve watched you struggle over pointless crap for years while people cheer for it here. They aren’t doing you any favors because there’s nothing noble about it. It’s just reinforcing bad behavior so that they can continue to behold the spectacle. You can do better than this.
