» Mr Heater F274800 Portable "Big Buddy" Heater

Mr Heater F274800 Portable "Big Buddy" Heater Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Big Buddy work well!
Comment: Very satisfied! The item lived up to it promises. I have a 900 sq ft. garage and it takes the chill out very fast. I would buy a "BIGGER BUDDY" if I could.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Warm heater
Comment: We went To GA and went camping the weekend before Thanksgiving and it was COLD. We slept well in our tent using this heater, only thing I would recommend is to get the attachment to use a 5 gal propane bottle instead of the 1 gal ones, as we had to get up in the middle of the night to change the tanks.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Mr Heater Big Buddy
Comment: Heater performs great, I would suggest the hose adapter or refill adapter for the small bottles if you use it much. Good product.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: It's a money pit
Comment: My wife bought this for me so I could stay warm while working in the garage during the winter months. I also experienced the quick shut-down of running on 1 lb canisters... and it plain just doesn't last long on them. As a person with some sort of environmental conscience, I couldn't keep that up. Yes, I could go for the 20 lb. BBQ tank, but then there's the fuel filter and the special hoses required to hook it up. Did I mention that the AC adapter to run the fan is not included, and will cost $20 at Radio Shack? However, the fan itself is a total joke--a little 80 mm computer case fan moves more air that that! So you'll probably want to run some sort of box fan next to the unit to blow the heat around the room. I feel really bad because I know my wife tried hard to find me something really nice; but this requires too much extra time and money to get it working properly. Sure, I like to "tinker," but not with something as basic as heat. Besides, I want my "tinkering" time to be taken up with my hobbies, not fudging around with the heater just to get the garage warm.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Best thing I've ever bought!
Comment: My heavily retro-insulated 1920 NH colonial is heated with base-board heat supplied by an oil fired water boiler. Living alone now, and seeing oil prices exceeding $4.25/gallon this summer, I decided to get creative with space heaters. After a lot of research, I bought a Big Buddy for my downstairs 12x24 office and a Delonghi TRD0715T oil-filled radiator for my upstairs, 12x12 bedroom. Both have proven to be excellent choices.

To fire my Big Buddy, I drilled a small hole in the wall to the outside, just large enough to sneak the 12' regulated propane hose (accessory) outside and into a barbeque grill size propane tank. I built a little, enclosed stand for the propane tank so I could reach out a window to turn it off and on rather than have to go outside to do it. I've been keeping the rest of the downstairs at 50 degrees as I don't use the other rooms except to walk through to get to my office. In the morning, I fire my Big Buddy up to the max 18,000 btu and in 20 minutes the room is at 60 degrees. Then I turn the heater down to 9,000 btu for a half hour or so until the room is up to 65 degrees, then down to 4,000 btu until the room is at 70 degrees, and for the rest of the day I vary between 4,000 btu and just a pilot light. At a local propane dealer, I can get a 20 lb. barbeque tank filled for $10. I keep two barbeque tanks, so when one runs out of propane, I have another ready to go. So far I go through a tank about every 10 days. No mess, no fumes, no headaches, no problems. Between this heater and the excellent Delonghi heater in my bedroom, I have so far used 1/8 tank of heating oil since August, where I would otherwise by now have used more near 3/4 of my 275 gallon oil tank. Even as heating oil has dropped considerably in price since August, that's still a huge savings.

One downside of my Big Buddy is the installed fan is not only noisy but pretty useless. To compensate for this, I have a six inch fan propped up behind and toward the top of the heater to blow the rising heat around the room. My Big Buddy isn't thermostat controlled, but who cares? When the room is up to the temperature I want, I get up out of my chair once every couple hours or so and turn the heat control up or down, and for that minor inconvenience I save a small fortune on heating oil.

If you buy the Big Buddy, be sure to turn off your propane source and let your Big Buddy pilot light go out before you turn off the unit. Otherwise, enjoy the relatively inexpensive heat from this excellent powerhouse.

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