The Best Options for Garage Heater Installations in Sherwood Park During Winter
Imagine walking into your garage on a minus 20°C morning in Sherwood Park, and instead of scrambling to warm your tools or clear frost off your car, you’re met with a cozy, ready-to-go space. Many Edmonton area homeowners assume heating a garage is too expensive, inefficient, or only for workshops. But today, we’re going to bust those myths.
So, of course, I’m here with Adrien Hinse from Hinse Brothers Mechanical. Hi, Adrien.
Hi.
Right on. And today we’re going to be talking about adding garage heaters and unit heaters, the importance of it, the pros and cons, and how it’s, you know, available for anybody in the Edmonton Sherwood Park area.
All right, question number one. Adrien, when you first go into an Edmonton area garage on a minus 30°C morning and the heater kicks in, what’s the first thing you say to yourself?
When the heater kicks in? When a heater kicks in, first thing I say to myself is, ah, thankful to have heat.
Yes, thankful to have heat. Anybody who has a unit heater in their garage knows that. Man, you don’t have to wipe the snow off your car. You don’t have to scrape the windshield, any of that stuff.
What are some other the great benefits you have from having a heater in your garage?
Yeah, so you’ve got the workshop availability. We’ve got unit heaters that are actually capable of working in dusty environments as well. So they’ll have like a separate combustion chamber and air from outside used for combustion.
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Typical like forced air unit heaters will use combustion air from the space. But if you’re in a dusty environment, you don’t want that dust getting into the burner section of the unit. So these units actually have a heat exchanger and a separate compartment for combustion, and we can do the same with tube heaters as well.
So a lot of different applications. Everybody’s different. So, you know, with that type of application there is a cost as well. So we don’t want to just put that in there unless it’s being used as somewhat of a living space. You know, nightclub in the garage. We saw a lot of those come up. Man cave.
Let’s talk about electric and gas. How do you walk a homeowner in Stony Plain through choosing between an electric overhead heater versus a gas unit heater, especially given Alberta’s energy context?
So, there’s quite a few considerations. Keep in mind, with a gas-burning appliance, you do need to vent that.
So we’re often have issues with people that have duplexes. And if you’ve got a bonus room over the garage, it makes it difficult. You can’t actually go through the roof with the vent, and going out the sidewall is also difficult because you don’t want—you get a little bit of condensation from your venting. So you don’t want that going onto your sidewalk.
Not to mention, you’ll be seeing the venting pipe coming right out to, you know, your front door.
So we have some different options. We’ve got direct vented units. So they have basically quite a small outlet that can be put on the side of the house. You’re not going to bump into it when you’re walking by it, that type of thing. That’s a possibility.
We have a look at can we put it on the opposite side of the house.
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Electric is an option. They are quite expensive to run. So I do caution people before they go that route. You know, it is a fair bit cheaper to buy an electric heater, but to provide enough heat, you’d want to go with a 220, and the efficiency is not there. So it’s going to hit you quite hard in the, you know, in the heating months with the electric bill.
Yeah.
Compared to gas, heating is a fair bit more friendly in price in Alberta specifically. But we do have to look at all those different site-specific installation issues that can come up. You know, not having availability for venting.
The other thing too is we need to have a gas line either roughed in already or run a new gas line. Those can be surface-mounted on the outside of the house, or if your basement is unfinished or has like a drop ceiling, we can run it in that space from your mechanical room.
So we do a site visit, assess the situation, put together kind of the best possible options for you.
If you do have a high ceiling, we can go with radiant heating as well. They do kind of require a little more room because, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked directly under a tube heater or had your car right under one, but it produces a fair bit of heat. So we want to maintain proper clearances. You don’t want it directly on like a vehicle for extended periods of time if you want to protect that.
Well, you get a little bit of—it’s kind of a little bit corrosive on the surfaces. So the other thing too when we’re talking about corrosive, if you’ve got a lot of salt on your vehicle, parking it in a heated garage will actually activate the salt. So you need to be conscious of that. Keep your vehicle clean.
My dad didn’t wash his vehicle a lot, so there was always salt in the wheel wells, and, you know, it ended up rusting his wheel wells. So if it’s great having a heated garage, just got to keep the vehicle clean so you can prolong the life of it.
Gotcha. Well, that’s a good tip. Yeah. For anybody, you should always clean your vehicle in the winter anyways, just because of the salt.
Well, it’s tricky to keep it that way.
So, it’s so hard.
All right. So what role does insulation and garage door ceiling play in sizing a unit heater for a two-car garage in the Edmonton region? And how often do you recommend upgrading the envelope first?
So, upgrading the envelope, I typically—I just want to make sure that there’s proper insulation, you know, vapor barrier put in. We want to have that done before we put in the unit heater.
We can run the gas line first if you want to keep that hidden, but having your roof and your walls insulated, drywall or whatever walls you’re putting in, you want to have that completed first.
The garage doors, you know, sometimes they need just an adjustment. The seals, maybe there’s a gap between the seal and the garage or something like that.
Keep in mind too, if there’s a lot of windows on the garage door, it’s a massive heat loss happening there. So we would have to upsize the heater a bit.
So, for a homeowner who uses their garage as a workshop or a gym, how does a unit heater change that space’s usability, especially during our long winters? Any real-life conversion stories you can share?
So, I’ve actually—especially in the COVID times when we had the shutdown—we’ve had a lot of people put their own gym in their garage. We had a lot of people put their gyms in their garage. It made more usable space.
One thing we do want to consider too is if you’re using it as a living space, you don’t want to be using all the air for combustion. So that’s when that separated combustion unit would be particularly effective.
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You can basically just, you know, you’ve got that if it’s unused space, you know, you can open it up. And I’ve seen people put theaters in the garage, golf simulators, pool tables, you name it. Man cave type stuff, or woman cave, right? Whatever it is you do.
Yeah. And yeah, the garage heater just makes it able to do it, right?
That’s awesome.
Now, let’s dig into unit heaters specifically. How do you determine the right ceiling-mounted unit heater for a tall ceiling attached garage versus a detached shop?
So yeah, ceiling height is a big issue. We typically try to keep the unit heater near the back of the garage, right? If you have a tall ceiling, it gives us a little more option. We can hang the unit lower.
We want to keep a certain distance off the floor, and we don’t want it too high up as well. So we basically follow the manufacturer recommendations.
We can’t have a unit heater hanging lower than the tracks on your garage door unless it’s like further back against the wall so that it doesn’t get hit by a vehicle coming into the space or something like that.
If you have really tall ceilings, tube heaters are great. They’re more efficient by nature. They’re actually radiating heat.
I’ve done videos on radiant heat, and they’ll heat the floor, they’ll heat your toolbox, they’ll heat everything in there so that it starts to store that heat.
So forced air, you’re heating the air, and that can cool off quite quickly. When you’re heating objects, they’ll retain that heat, and the heater won’t have to turn on as much.
Now, in Edmonton, how have changes in home energy behavior, smart thermostats, AI controls impacted garage heater installations? Are you seeing more demand for smart features or remote controls for unit heaters?
So typically, people put in just a standard one-heat control. They just want to keep it at a certain temperature all the time.
And then there’s others where they’ve got some pretty expensive products that they can’t have freeze, and they want to be able to monitor that situation.
So it is an option if we run enough wires, we can, you know, connect it to a smart thermostat, and then you can actually track that on an app on your phone and make sure that, you know, you get alerts if the heat stops working and that type of thing.
Right? Ultimately, if you have the budget, an in-floor heating system in your garage would be primo. Could be so.
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the most efficient way to heat the garage.
Now, what safety or ventilation issues come up most frequently with garage heaters and unit heaters in our climate? What should homeowners not skip?
It all comes down to how you’re using the garage. If you’re using it as a living space and you’ve got vehicles in there, if you’re using it as like a little your own mechanic shop, you know, fresh air is pretty important.
So we can do things such as install like an ERV, energy recovery ventilator. So what that’ll do is bring in fresh air and expel stale air.
At the same time as it’s expelling the stale air, it’s going to warm up the incoming air. So you’re going to have less energy loss.
Right? So same idea with the separate combustion. You’re not using all the air for combustion.
But if you’ve got that higher need for fresh air, we can incorporate, you know, an ERV into the situation, or some people go with just a ventilation fan interlocked with a louver.
Okay. So it’s just exhausting.
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Issue with that, like I said before, when it’s really cold, you’re bringing straight cold air from outside. So it’s good to have like a preheat, some type of preheat, so you’re not introducing just straight up -30 air into your garage.
Your unit heater is never going to shut off.
Okay.
So, if somebody in St. Albert is budget-sensitive but wants a reliable solution, what would you suggest to install? A basic unit heater now, or invest in higher efficiency or smarter controls? How do you help them evaluate the return on investment?
So, I would—if possible—I would recommend going with a radiant tube heater if your ceiling height is enough because there’s a little bit more upfront cost, but down the road you’re going to see about 30% savings in your gas usage for the garage.
And garages are typically not sealed as well as your house, right? So there is more heat loss. So any efficiency improvements you can make, I recommend it.
You know, in-floor heating, there’s quite a bit higher upfront cost. So that would typically be done during construction.
But upfront cost-wise, a unit heater is, you know, more economical to put in.
I just recommend if you do put in a smart thermostat, you basically warm up the space, constant temperature as long as possible, and then just turn it up as you need to use it if you’re using it as a mechanic space or whatever.
But constant temperature is the key to success when it comes to efficiency.
Now, looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, what technological innovations or regulatory changes do you see impacting garage heater installations in the Edmonton area? And how should homeowners position themselves now?
Well, I haven’t seen it quite yet, but, you know, there’s one issue with going high efficiency in a garage space.
Most places don’t have a drain. So when you put high-efficiency heating equipment in there, they produce condensation.
So we have to do something with that. We have to put a drain in or get rid of that condensation somehow.
So I can’t see there being a massive change because of that issue, right?
So in your home, you have to put in a high-efficiency boiler or high-efficiency furnace, but in the garage, you’re allowed mid-efficiency equipment, you know, right around the 80% efficiency mark.
Overall, if you’re going to give somebody a recommendation, one of those radiant tube heaters is probably your number one recommendation.
And then what would be a close number two?
Close number two is the forced air. They’re running about 83% efficiency.
You do get that 30% more efficiency with having the radiant. The ultimate is in-floor heat, but there’s a higher cost associated with that as well.
Well, there you have it, folks. We got all the things you need to know about a garage heater or unit heater for your shop or garage in the Edmonton area.
Of course, when you need help, call Adrien from Hinse Brothers Mechanical, and he’ll be happy to come out and give you a quote.
Thanks, Adrien.
Thank you.