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Do the Buddy Heater Safety Features Really Work? Putting it to the Test!
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May 21, 2024
When a propane heater says it's safe for indoor use, the skeptic in me comes out. So I put the safety features of the Mr Heater Portable Buddy Heater to the test. Let's see just how safe this heater is and how well those safety features actually work. Here’s a link to the heater in this video that I’ve had for a few years. https://amzn.to/3ttCu5Z Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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One important consideration for preparedness is how we're going to stay warm when we don't
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have our normal utilities and how we're going to do that in a way that keeps us safe even
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if we're inside our own home, maybe inside a tent or inside of another structure
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Today we're going to do some testing to find out if one of the most popular indoor safe
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propane heaters on the market today is actually indoor safe. Hello my friends and welcome back to Pantry Preparedness. Today we are actually testing the
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Mr. Heater, portable buddy heater. This is kind of the standard. It's a good size. This is
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supposed to heat up. We're going to see what they actually say. I think it's something like 255 square feet. I've actually had this one for a few years now. I've used it for camping
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as well as even inside in the home if there's a power outage and it's the middle of the winter
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And so far, nobody's died. But I don't think that that's a good enough test. So today we're
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going to actually do that testing ourselves. The buddy heater here has two specific safety
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controls that are built into it. The first one is that if the oxygen level of whatever room
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it's in gets too low, it will shut itself off. Now, when it shuts itself off, I really wanted to know
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Is it just the pilot light that turns off? Because then you still have gas like spewing out
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into the air. That wouldn't be a good thing. I would assume not. But again, this is our safety we're
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talking about. But I also had another question regarding that, because this is relative to
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oxygen percentage in the air. Well, what about carbon monoxide? If carbon monoxide levels get too high, but the oxygen level isn't too low yet
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then we could still actually be in a very dangerous situation, and this could potentially never turn off
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So I wanted to know what that might look like, but then I also wanted to test their other feature
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The other safety feature is the tip over feature. If this thing tips over, it supposedly once again turns off
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Again, does that mean that the gas turns off and the pilot light, one or the other both
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So we're going to see. So first things first, we need the right tools, and we need to set up the right testing environment
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So, I went and made a deal or maybe no deal. That's what everybody tells me
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When I showed them this box that I got, this is what it came in. This is a gas detector
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This is going to tell us our oxygen levels in the air. It's going to tell us the carbon monoxide levels
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and a couple other things that we're not as interested in for this particular test. So I bought this just so that we could test this out today
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And so we're going to be using that. The other thing we need to do is set up an enclosure
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where we can run this thing and not have it take like hours and hours and hours to deplete the oxygen levels
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I want to see how much carbon monoxide gets generated in that much space
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what the concentration looks like as the oxygen concentration decreases. Now, if I use too small of a space
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I understand that that might not quite level up with, match up with reality
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But overall, if air is kind of circulating throughout a space relatively evenly
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then what we should see is that they should, move up and down, like the oxygen level as it decreases, the carbon monoxide level should increase
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at about the same rate, meaning that as we increase to a larger space, it's going to take a lot
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longer for the oxygen to deeply and for the CO to increase, but it should happen relatively the same
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So oxygen shouldn't suddenly decrease a whole lot faster while CO goes up slower
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So it should scale pretty well. So we going to start by creating a nice little test environment So for that I bought here a tote So we gonna cut a window in the top so can see inside because I got to put the gas detector on the inside and I need to be able to read it constantly I have a feeling this is going to go kind of fast So we going to go
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ahead and we're going to put this box together first. With this whole cut out, I can go ahead
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and I just got some silicon so that we could put a nice seal around it. It'll seal off really well
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and hold it in place. With that dry, we're ready to do the testing. So we go ahead. We're going to
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set the heater in the box. As it's running in this room, even with the door, closed. It's not picking up any carbon monoxide yet and it's showing the oxygen level at a
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regular 20.9%. I was curious wondering, is this thing even going to work very well? Because I would
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think in an enclosed room we'd start to be able to measure a little bit of a difference. But I have
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kind of tall ceilings in here and well, it didn't seem to be causing any sort of an issue. We
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weren't having O2 levels decreasing over the course of 10, 15, 20 minutes at any sort of level
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that we could measure. So we get this in here. It's turned on. We're setting the gas detector right on top of it so that it's visible through the window
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And so that there's some space here in front of the heater because I really don't want the heater just like melting it right through this tote
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We'll turn it on and we're going to see what happens. Okay, so the numbers, they increased super fast
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This only seemed to take 30 seconds or so to actually run. So let me show you the numbers that I got when I ran this thing
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First of all, there were kind of two levels of this thing turning off. The first was when the pilot light went out
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That happened when carbon monoxide levels were at 63 parts per million and when the oxygen got down to 15.6%
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But the heater was still burning for a little bit longer. And in fact, as it continued to burn, the oxygen level continued to decrease, but the carbon monoxide level started to shoot up
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By the time it completely turned off and there was no combustion happening anymore, the oxygen level had decreased to 15%
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but the carbon monoxide had gone up to 268 parts per million
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Now, it's important that we have a little bit of context for this. So I'm going to pull up some official sources
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The first one here, this is actually from EHS today. This is environmental health and safety
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EHS is like, it's a big topic specifically regarding workplace safety. And so here we go
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They say when the concentration of oxygen decreases even slightly like one to
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two percent from normal, which is 20.9% in the air, people still
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start to feel those effects. So, let's see what those effects are. A healthy individual is unable
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to work strenuously and their coordination may be affected by oxygen environments of 15 to 19%
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So the oxygen level never got below 15%. So if the question is, is the oxygen level from
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running this buddy heater ever going to get low enough to cause us serious danger to put us in
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a really dangerous situation? It sounds like the worst thing that's going to happen above 15% is for a
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normal healthy person to have reduced coordination or to be unable to work strenuously
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So actually that seems pretty okay. If the oxygen gets down to 10 to 12% then you're going to start
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breathing faster. Your lips are going to start to turn blue and have impaired judgment
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And then you could start fainting or go unconscious down in that 8 to 10% level. If it gets down to 6% to 8
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oxygen, you die within about 8 minutes. Wow. But we didn't get anywhere near there. We stayed above the 15
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And even by the time this completely went out, we were still at 15%
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So from an oxygen level standpoint first of all inside your home a 225 square foot room I don expect the oxygen level to ever get that low unless that room is completely sealed off Any sort of ventilation even through the cracks under doors and stuff you not going to get that low
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Now, if you're trying to trap the heat in in a room and so you do kind of block off all of the ways that air could escape
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because you're trying to keep one room warm, it's possible that oxygen levels could start to get that low
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absolutely possible. But if it does, I'm pretty confident, at least with my own test, that this is
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going to work. I'll also point out these were tested by the CSA. They have a CSA certification
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The CSA is a third party private entity. It's not a government organization. It's a certifying
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organization out of Canada. And this is specifically certified in the United States and Canada
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to be safe for both outdoor and indoor use. So that's a good thing. But now we've got to talk about
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carbon monoxide. Here we're going to go straight to the consumer product safety commission
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And according to the consumer product safety commission, here's what they say. Most people will
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not experience any symptoms from even from prolonged exposure to CO levels of approximately
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1 to 70 parts per million. So when the pilot light turned off and it was only measuring 63
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that's actually totally okay. However, as the levels get above that 70 parts per million, you're going to
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start to be able to have some symptoms and they're just going to get worse the higher it gets
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So these symptoms are going to be things like headache, fatigue, and nausea. It says that sustained concentrations above 150 to 200, disorientation, unconsciousness
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and death are possible. We got to 263 before this turned off. Now, I'm willing to acknowledge
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that my test was in a small, very small, very enclosed space. And so it built up really fast
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And that a lot of that was only measured after the pilot light turned off. I'll also acknowledge
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here that when the pilot light turns off it's always usually going to take a
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little bit of time before the whole thing completely goes out and that in a
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larger space larger than that little tiny tote that I put this thing in the
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change in concentration of carbon monoxide and oxygen isn't going to happen
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nearly as quickly so in a room like this once the pilot light shuts off the
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change in carbon monoxide levels probably not going to increase nearly as fast so I'm willing to consider that once the pilot light goes off the C's
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CO levels are probably not going to go up very much from the 63 number that we got before
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But if they did get all the way up to that 268 in a room, all the people inside would be potentially
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in significant danger. Which means that this might merit a little more testing or if you're
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going to use this inside your house where you're not potentially going to have great ventilation
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if there's no power or something like that, make sure that you have a carbon monoxide detector
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an alarm that's going to go off. This one actually alarmed and it was super annoying
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which is great. But inside of modern homes today, carbon monoxide detectors are really common, and they're not very expensive
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So make sure that you just have a carbon monoxide detector on hand so that if something like this did happen
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the carbon monoxide levels wouldn't get that high. You could consider that even if you go camping and use it in a tent
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But in a tent, you are definitely going to get more airflow in and out
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And so I don't believe that the carbon monoxide levels are ever going to reach the kind of numbers we saw inside that tote
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But of course, your safety is up to you. Alright so that what we found with carbon monoxide and with the oxygen levels By the time the oxygen levels get low enough to shut this thing off the carbon monoxide level had only to hit 63 parts per million but before this thing completely shut off
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it did reach dangerously high levels. Now we've got to talk about the second safety feature on this buddy heater
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and that is the tip over feature. The last thing we would want is to have this thing on inside of our home
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trying to keep us warm, and then it gets bumped in the night by someone who rolls over in their sleep
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maybe, falls over, and lights the room on fire. So, this supposedly has a safety feature where if it tips, it turns off
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I tested this basically every which way. I did it with just the pilot light on
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I did it with it on low. I did it with it in between low and high. Which apparently you're not supposed to ever have it running between low and high
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In every situation, here's what I found. If I tip it slowly, you'll see here in my testing when I tipped it slowly
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it got to about 45 degrees and it shut off. That was a pretty good sign. So then I thought, okay, well, how quickly can it shut off if I just knock it over quickly
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And every single time I did it, it was completely off. We're talking even the burn plate and everything was there was nothing
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There was no heat coming out of that thing anymore, no flame anymore before it even landed
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I find that to be pretty encouraging and a pretty awesome safety feature
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The second piece, though, that I tested for, it wasn't just whether or not the flame would turn off
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But now is there fuel spewing out into the room creating a dangerous environment there as well
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What I found was no. With propane like this uses, we put a smelling agent in it so that you can always smell if it's present in the air around you
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I was completely unable to detect any propane, even holding it up and there just was none
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I found that when it tips over, it completes the shut off the fuel as well as turning off the pilot light and not having any more flame
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In fact, in my personal experience, I found that if the pilot light goes out, there's no fuel flowing
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I've never had that situation happen to me where the pilot light went out by itself and there continued to be propane coming out of the heater
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So, here's my own personal feeling on the buddy heater. I feel pretty confident having this thing
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I've used it a lot in tents. I've used it inside my home
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And I have not had a situation where I felt like it was particularly unsafe in any way
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but I also believe that everybody should take responsibility for their own safety
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And so if I were to use this inside my home with my family, I would probably use it in a room with a carbon monoxide detector
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just to be safe. But for camping, I just don't even have that concern at all
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especially after doing this testing. As far as safety goes, there are other things, of course, to be careful about
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If this thing is standing up normal, it's not going to turn itself off
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if objects that are flammable come into contact with it. So make sure that if you are going to use a buddy heater or any sort of combustion heat source
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inside of a home or really anywhere, that you don't have any flammable or combustible materials
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anywhere near, especially the front of it, because that is going to create a dangerous situation
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And there's honestly nothing that Mr. Heater Company can do to prevent that
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So be smart. I hope you found that helpful. I love to test out lots of different products and lots of different preparedness gear
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as well as talk about all sorts of preparedness topics. If there's something you'd love to know more about, make sure you let me know in the comments below
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I hope to see you in our next video
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