Hey Little Buddy!

Last April my wife Susan and I were into Wal-Mart getting ready to check out. Up front near the registers they had hauled out three skids of various space heaters that they were trying to get rid of. The price was right, they were all between five and seven dollars. Most were electric but there were a few propane heaters. One was the Little Buddy heater. I was looking it over and  Susan thought that it might be a good little heater for my shop. I wasn't so sure. I said, " I don't like the idea of constantly having to buy the 1 pound cylinders to run it". You only get 5.5 hours of heat from one cylinder. There was another guy there, grabbing several heaters, who overheard me and said that he was pretty sure that you could buy an adapter kit to run it off a 20 pound cylinder. So, for five bucks I said why not, it retails on Amazon for $64.99 . When I got home I did some online research but could not find an adapter kit for the Little Buddy. However, I did find a refill adapter for $15.72 on Amazon. This was even better because it was really designed  to run off the one pounders. So now, when I run out of propane, I take off the cylinder, refill it from a 20 pounder screw it back on the heater and I'm up and running again in about 5 minutes, sweet. As far as performance, this little heater throws off some serious heat. I haven't used it in my shop but where it has become very useful is for camping. We have an old pop-up and it has a small furnace but it's a pain to fire up and really doesn't put out as much heat as it should. Now on those cool mornings I just fire the Little Buddy and it takes the chill off in no time and it takes up very little space. 

As far as my shop goes, I added this propane heater, also made by Mr. Heater. I found it at VIP Auto for only $60.00. At first I couldn't figure out why it was so cheap. It retails on Amazon for $193.00. However, as I discovered, this is an older discontinued version that has the old style propane connection. No worries though because all of the new tanks are backwards compatible to the older style.  It puts out between 50,000 and 85,000 btu and works great. Last year I froze my butt off trying to heat my shop with a kerosene space heater. This unit gets the shop up to temperature in less than 10 minutes. One downside is that it is loud. Of course, when you heat a shop only when you are in it, you create huge swings in temperature and humidity. Combine that with cast iron tools and you get.....rust. Unfortunately , I am not ready to add full time heating to my shop so I have a bunch of scotch brite pads and a can of butcher's wax.

DSR