Heater

[graywri]

I recently bought a 1999 Coleman Santa Fe. I love the camper but it doesn't have a furnace. Is there a problem with using an electric ceramic type space heater, the kind some folks use under an office desk?

[chasd60]

An electric heater will work fine if you have hookups. If you don't have hookups you are out of luck.

[Johnowolf]

We've used an electric/ceramic space heater in the past. Works well to heat a PU. One thing, though ... watch the amount of draw. It's easy to get one that will overload your power (in one case, we had limited power available from the supply and tripped the breaker at least once). I've heard suggestions of running a separate extension cord out the bunkend to plug in the space heater.Obviously it won't do you any good if you don't have hookups, since you won't get very far on an inverter . The other alternative is to look into something like the "Mr Buddy" heaters or the Coleman Catalytic heaters. They do have some that are rated for "indoor/outdoor".

[slowpez]

We used a Holmes heater we purchased from Wally World for about $20.  We also didn't camp in the really cold months unless we had electricity.  OK, we didn't camp a lot without electricity in the cold months.  Anyhow, the space heater worked great not to mention it worked silently.

Good luck, stay warm.  Susan

[griffsmom]

We have a Vornado that we bought from Costco.  It has an automatic thermostat and keeps us very cozy.  As the others have pointed out, you'll need hook ups to run it.

[tlhdoc]

Like the others said yes.  You might want to run two heaters if it is really cold out.  If you go with 2 heaters you should plug one into the power pole, two plugged into the camper may blow the circuit breaker.
 
Congratulations on the PU purchase.

[order191]

Like the others said yes.  You might want to run two heaters if it is really cold out.  If you go with 2 heaters you should plug one into the power pole, two plugged into the camper may blow the circuit breaker.
 
Congratulations on the PU purchase.

If I didn't have a furnace, I'd definitely get two. Like everyone says, even with one, plug it into the pole with a heavy extension cord or you will probably blow the circuit breaker when you use the microwave or coffeemaker. One thing I hadn't considered was the possibility of a campground that only had 30 amp plugs on the pole. We were at Mt. Creek Campground in PA last fall and couldn't run it to the pole for that reason. After that I got a 20 to 30 adaptor (already had the 30 to 20).

[griffsmom]

We actually bought two Vornados and learned the hard way that plugging them both in at the same time in the camper blows the fuse.
 
We have since just used the one Vornado, and actually, it by itself has kept us more than warm enough. (Just in case you camped where you don't have an extra plug on the hook up pole.)

[mike4947]

If your trailer has an AC or is "AC ready" you'll have a 20 amp outlet that's normally just for the AC and has it's own dedicated 20 amp breaker. But since it's cold you don't need it and can plug the second heater into the 20 amp outlet and that will give you one on the 15 amp main and a second on the 20 amp AC outlet.

We've even plugged a single heater into the 20 amp, so we can have the full 15 amp available for other 120 volt goodies.

[zamboni]

As Mike pointed out -- we've used a standard 1500W heater (on max) plugged into the A/C circuit, and a thermostat-controlled heater in the regular circuit.  Together, they kept the baby's end of the camper quite comfy.

For dry camping, we bought a Mr. Heater "Buddy", and recently spent 4 days at the beach (Northern CA, windy, so it got down to 50 at night) -- and it worked perfectly.  With the extension, we ran it off a standard 20-lb propane tank instead of the 1lb portable cans.  It did run the tank empty the last evening, so I switched it to our camper's spare tank (our Coleman has 2 tanks; I'd brought a 3rd for the Mr Heater).

It is rated for indoor use - it has a low oxygen sensor that definitely works (when the first tank ran out, and the flame died, enough propane leaked into the heater that it would not relight (even though the Coleman LPG sensor did not go off) with a new tank until I aired out the entire camper for several minutes).