Warming this Canadian's garage workshop
I ordered this heater and installed it roughly a month ago. It is located in my garage workshop. I am a small business person (professional, sculptor/artist) who is located in Calgary Alberta Canada. Needless to say, I live in a cold part of the world, but back to the heater. My wife found out about this heater a few years ago while she was on a volunteer board. One of the board members mentioned using it in their camper and how efficient they thought it was. So I decided I would read some of the reviews and wait a little while to see if any sales came up. Times got busy an so I forgot about the heater for a while. As the air started to get cooler, I started thinking about having a warm garage again. It just so happened that there was a sale on the ENVI 1000watt when I was looking, so I bought one. Over the past two years I've been using two heaters to help keep my garage warm enough to work, and warm enough to cure silicone mold materials. One of them is a Wexstar 800watt infrared panel heater and the other is an inexpensive 1500 watt quartz radiant heater. Together, they do a decent job, but use a lot of energy and can cause my breaker to flip due to the amperage pull. Having a breaker flip can be deeply problematic, when working with expensive mold materials that one needs to cure. Some of these materials require overnight curing, therefore the garage needs to maintain a temperature of roughly twenty-three celsius. Enter the Envi. I bought this heater thinking it has to be better than the quartz heater and might be able to work in tandem with my panel heater. If anyone knows anything about infrared heating, these heaters are good at heating objects, but terrible at heating the air. Therefore, the air was often cool in my garage which is also problematic for both a working environment and for curing expensive materials. I first tested the Envi Heater on its own for a few days, because I wanted to see what sort of temperature it could meet without any back up. I tested Envi's thermostat using laser thermometers on different objects in the garage, including the concrete floor near the heater, the wall around the heater, the garage door and my work tables. After doing these tests, including calibrating my thermometers near the wall of my NEST thermostat indoors, I concluded that the ENVI thermostat was slightly out of calibration. This is likely due to the difference in elevation and humidity from the heaters origin calibration in Texas, compared to Calgary. So I made some adjustments to the calibration, which is a really cool feature to have on a heater such as this. After calibration, the heater seemed to be able to find the correct heat and actually started heating to a point where the heating would turn off once the target temperature was reached. Once I sorted out these issues, i started to test the ENVI with the Wexstar. What I found is that these two heaters complement each other very nicely. But the quality of the Envi, is much higher than the Wexstar. When comparing price, efficiency, and manufacturing quality, the ENVI wins without question. Now that I've had some time to test the heaters together and apart, I can say with confidence that the ENVI heater is a real marvel of engineering. I have been able to test this heater on its own, warming the garage on weekends and it has been able to heat from 15*C to 19*c in a matter of three or four hours. This is as fast as high efficency gas furnace for central heating in a house. I have also opened the garage door on days when it was required, when the temperature was -3*c. What I noticed is that this ENVI heater seems to like cold air. I thought it would take a ridiculously long time to regain the heat in my garage after opening the bay door, but was surprised to see that it only took a few hours. When the cold air rushed in, the ENVI's convection technology went to work, transferring it into warm air. It was surprising effective at this job. In conclusion, if you're in the market for a heater, whether in your home or in a workshop like mine, these little heaters are a fantastic option. I would recommend this heater to anyone I know, and even those I don't know. What I forgot to mention earlier, is that this 1000WATT heater is able to run with my 800watt panel heater without flipping a breaker switch. Meanwhile, the efficiency is so amazing for drawing so little power. Just buy one and you'll understand.
