I think you should have gone with a wood stove, your garage is ideal for that,brick walls, small size, and no insulation up top. I have 25'x22'x8' garage with only insulated walls and lots draft from my big garage door. I use 30"x17"x20" wood stove and within 40 mins I can work very comfi and it gets better as time passes. I installed my chimney by myself and found it very easy to do if you are handy with a miter or skill saw and own a drill. It was my first installation and hardly any challange to it. I wouldn't consider any other type of heating in my garage. Used wood stoves are cheap and easy to find.You don't need to spend more than a 100-150 for a good used one. The chimney, you buy as a kit ,which will give eveything you need to install it up to code. The most important part is building a frame for the chimney support. The rest is just putting stuff together. The basics of operating "safely" a wood stove is something you learn in a week and in time you will get better and become real good at it. You should install a damper in your stove pipe, for better use of the heat produced by the stove and a fan behind the stove will help you alot. If you or anyone else need more info just ask. Vic

That is one of the first things I am going to check. When I was checking it out a few days ago I noticed that gas was not coming out of the pilot tube and the vent fan wasn't coming on. I got the idea that the fan would need to come on before the gas would flow and there would have to be some kind of sensor to make sure it was on. Now I know the sensor is probably just a vacuum switch. It should be real easy to check that and power to the fan. And I found out that 27 volts is the correct voltage AND the expected life span of an ignitor is 3-5 years. Mine is just over the 5 year mark and the site recommends keeping a spare on hand anyway since Murphy's law says it will quit working during the coldest week of the year and the service guy won't have one in stock. Could take days to get one ordered. So I am considering going ahead and changing the ignitor anyway. I'll know a lot more when I do some tests this weekend. Thanks. Pooh Bear

Hello, Adding an element, probably needs increased sized breakers, controller, and proper house wiring. The 2 breakers are for the fan blower, and for the heat. They need to be seperate to the panel for safe installation. When you drop in size, you probably are droping in fan CFM. This can reduce cooling capaciity. When sizing a system, load is needed to determine size of blower. If you changed very much, I would consider doing a manual J to determine load requirements. Normally I ask if the HVAC runs all of the time during hot days, and does the house stay cool? If the answer is yes to both of these questions, I would NEVER consider reducing the size of the equipment. If the answer is no and yes, then the equipment size can be reduced. With the sizable increase of utility costs, I am recommending oversizing the equipment. In my area, N. Texas, we get many days over 100 during the summer. Some years we get over 100 consective days of 100F degrees. Systems were designed for average temperature for many years, with the assumption that the hot days would not be unbearable. IMO the hot days are what a system should be designed for, with extra padding to compensate for equipment efficiency on the hot days. Cold climate is different. Equipment does not fail as much in cold climate as in hot climate. Efficiency is higher in cold climate. Resistive heat is always the same, in any temperature. A heatpump is less costly to operate than resistive heat to the point where it cannot remove any cold from the system. Somewhere around 35 f degrees.

Thank you all for the check-ins! It sounds like most of you are able to stay reasonably cool, more or less, in the house. Wanttoretire, sounds like the whole east coast is getting it bad. Any forecast of it cooling down at all? I don't think I knew anybody growing up who had A/C in the car. Riding in the back seat to our little family car with my two brothers and sister was horrible on those many hot days in central CA! Jay/mushcreek, yikes! That does sound depressing! I do remember you talking about your super insulation when you were building the house. The Hardi board is pretty solid insulation in and of itself, IIRC. Glad to hear about the mini split, since I'm planning to do that. llucy, glad to hear you're cool by comparison, lol! I remember being in Daytona for a race back around 1997, and it was over 90 and pouring, torrential rain! I'd never experienced that. Cooper, my brother lives in New Mexico, is a geochemist at the nuclear power plant. When they moved there a couple of years ago, they bought a house without a pool, thinking they'd put one in later. Never got around to it. So a few weeks ago a house came up for sale just around the corner from them. Pool included. So they bought it, quick close, and are now enjoying the pool, haha! Chris/Shades, again, good to hear about the mini split! My power bill was $59 last month, but I'm sure it will be more this month, because I've been running the window A/C and the fans more. Lass, yep, me too with the rain yesterday. I'm in Cheney. I was in Spokane Valley, and now from Cheney it's about 45 minutes to Post Falls, ID. So we're fairly close to each other. Today was lovely! Steph, so great to hear from you! I'm glad you're OK. I do the same thing, both to save gas, which seems to be going up daily here, and to avoid going out in the heat, which isn't heat at all compared to 110 in AZ! But I try to do all my errands in one or two days out of the week, I only grocery shop once a week on one of those days, then I can stay home, mostly inside, for a few days. Since I work from home, it also helps me stay on schedule. Hope everything's OK with the CT scan! murraysmom, I don't blame the dogs, haha! Sounds like things are under control with the A/C and the fans. Wow, I've never seen that iPhone message either! It must have been really, really hot. Good thing it didn't melt! I guess the watchword of the day is "stay cool!" :-)