Gear Review: Mr Heater Indoor Safe Propane Heater

It’s January and obviously pretty darn cold across most of the Country, so I thought it would be appropriate to finally review an important part of our Winter preps – our indoor safe propane heater. First of all, we do not have a fireplace or wood-burning stove, which by the way is on our long term wish list, but financially out of reach at the present time, so we needed a substitute. A power outage in the winter would make our forced air, gas fired furnace useless and us sitting in the cold watching the pipes burst – not exactly a good plan. Portable electric heaters such as the infrared type are awesome for keeping your heating bills in check, however, they too would be useless in this scenario.  We do have a kerosene heater, but kerosene storage can be an issue and unfortunately it’s become difficult to obtain kerosene in this area, we needed something else. Note: our old kerosene heater is over 30 years old and works as good today as it did then, but again, the issue of obtaining and storing fuel.

What we settled on is a small indoor safe propane heater from Mr. Heater. The heater is rated at 4,000 to 9,000 BTU depending on whether you set it to low or high. It runs on those little 1 lb bottles of camping gas (propane) with an optional adapter hose to run on the larger 20 lb bottles. The heater is rated for an area of about 225 square feet, enough to heat a decent size room, you’ll need more than one to heat an entire house. This little heater will run for 3-6 hours on the little bottles or 48 to 110 hours on the 20 lb versions, again, based on whether you have it set to high or low. Note: the little camping bottles are safe to store indoors, the 20 lb bottles are not.

Safety First! This little heater burns what amounts to a large pilot light size flame, like on the older gas stoves, that heats up what they call a heater tile (ceramic I believe.) It has a low oxygen shutoff as well as a tip over safety shutoff, but despite all the safety features, I would still suggest having a CO detector just in case.

This little guy cranks out some pretty good heat and just might save you in a winter time power outage. The little Buddy Heater is usually available on Amazon; when we went to purchase ours they were out of stock, but were able to pick one up at Walmart for just under $80. We’ve been buying the 1 lb camping gas in 2 packs at Walmart for about $6.25. Stay warm!

Hope you find this helpful.