When we bought our house over a year and a half ago, we were thankful that we had a heater in the garage because of the cold Minnesota winters. Very few houses we looked at had garage heaters and we looked at well over 100 houses.
The heater had a thermostat attached to it so my husband turned it down to the lowest setting last winter and the garage stayed nice and warm, especially on extra cold days.
This past January, after we arrived home from vacation, we pulled into the garage and it smelled like gas. The smell seemed to be coming from the gas heater so we turned it off and figured we’d have the gas company out to see if maybe we had a leak.
When I called the gas company though they told me someone would be out in a week. Hmm … it must not be important, I thought. So, we kept the gas valve turned off to the heater (the winter was quite mild) and I didn’t worry about it until late this summer.
When I called the gas company this time, they came out within 30 minutes. The young lady I spoke with regarding the problem said that someone should have come out immediately when I called before. What a warm fuzzy feeling I had in my stomach when I heard that. Uh, not!
The repairman did some testing and after a few minutes told me that the valve had a small leak but that it only leaked if the heater was turned on so there was no danger as long as we kept it off. He then told me I should call a heating/cooling company to replace the valve.
This time I decided to move a little quicker than before and called a heating/cooling company right away. The gentleman who came out measured the garage and told me that the heater we currently had was an industrial one and too large for the square footage we had.
That actually makes sense as the previous owner of our house worked in heating/cooling and did many “upgrades” to our house that went above and beyond what one would expect.
The options we had were to replace the valve or buy a new heater. Keeping in mind that the industrial heater was almost 20 years old, we decided to buy a new smaller heater. Maybe then it would be quieter also.
I felt sorry for the installers when they arrived to install the new heater as the old one was  really heavy and they should have had three men to dismantle it instead of two. Unfortunately, I could not offer my services as I didn’t want such a large contraption falling on my head. They figured it out but the old heater almost fell on one of the installers.
The newly purchased heater is a lot smaller than the old one, runs smoothly and is quieter.
We’re fortunate to own a garage heater. Yes, very very fortunate.
