Cheapest Way To Heat a Garage in Winter [Red Diesel] VEVOR Diesel Heater Review For Workshop or Van

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We have previously put a diesel heater in our camper van, and we were very pleased with it. It heats the van up quickly, and hardly seems to need refilling very often. The electric fan heater that I have been using in my workshop has become very expensive to run due to the large increase in the cost of electricity, so I was considering getting a diesel heater and rigging it up to heat the workshop up.

The arrival of this heater coincided with a very cold spell here in England with consistently freezing temperatures day and night. So the original plan of a careful installation to heat the workshop went out of the window, I had a heating emergency.

Like I did with the previous heater I wanted to test it first, so I put it together quite quickly. They aren’t difficult to build up. Attach the burner air inlet and the exhaust, add electricity and fuel then you are pretty much good to go. When I first went to start it, I had a bit of a problem priming it. When I looked inside the case this was caused by me being too stingy with the initial amount of diesel I had put in. I quickly resolved this by adding some diesel and holding the tank up so that gravity had the maximum force to help me.

Once I had confirmed that it ran OK I put it into my workshop under the bench. I ran the exhaust straight through the wall, there is only a single skin of wood there. I used some fire blanket to insulate the wood around the exhaust pipe as this is the only real concern.

These heaters run on 12v (24v for some models) DC. The sticker on the casing says 40w, but I know that this is the constant for the fan and the burner pump. When the glow plugs are starting off the consumption will be nearer to 100w, but that will only be for a couple of minutes at the start.

They are intended to be connected into a vehicle's wiring system. For now I decided to hook it up to a spare 12v car battery I have. This means that the battery will need to be charged when it starts to run down. It is a 70ah battery which means it should give 840 watt hours. It makes sense not to run the battery below 50% too often so the battery will need charging every 10 hours of running or so, but should last up to around 20 hours.

Eventually I intend to get a 240v AC to 12v DC power supply so that I can just plug it in. I will look for one that is around 100w to take into account the glow plugs at the start, but as it will mostly be running below 50% capacity so should be quite reliable.

To reduce the cost of running the heater I am going to burn red diesel. In the UK this is fuel for us in agriculture and for boats, so it has less tax on it. You can get a fine if you are caught using it in a car or van, so it pays to make sure you keep the containers separate.

I know that these heaters can also burn kerosene (paraffin in the UK), cooking oil and even old engine oil. There are some issues about using each of these so before I would use them I would look into it carefully. I do know that you need a licence to burn old engine oil, I suspect this is a pollution issue, but it would make running these kinds of heaters very cheap.

As I am using it at the moment, I found that the heater uses around .5 of a litre per hour when it is running at full speed. But this drops quite dramatically when you turn the pump speed down, to around .25 litres per hour. Once the room is at a working temperature and the heat it puts out with the fan turned full down is still quite sufficient to keep my workshop at a working temperature. So it has a substantially lower cost than heating with an electric fan heater, especially with the red diesel

My biggest problem in the workshop is the lack of insulation, it loses heat quite rapidly when I turn the heating off.

In use the heater is quite noisy, but probably no noisier than an electric fan heater. The ticking of the pump is perhaps the most intrusive sound. For normal use in a workshop it isn’t a problem. but if I am creating video content I couldn’t really have it running. I am hoping that I will be able to position the heater to run in a place further away from my work area, using some trunking to pipe in the hot air. But that is a job for another day, for the moment I am just going to enjoy the warmth.

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