Best Space Heaters for a Room or a Garage (2026)

Match the heater to the space first

The model matters less than the match. A 1,500W electric heater and a propane radiant solve different problems, and picking the wrong kind for the space is the commonest way to be cold and unhappy with a good product.

Both electric heaters here top out at 1,500W (Dreo: 1,000 to 1,500W; De'Longhi: 1,500W). In BTU terms, which is how propane heaters are rated, 1,500W is about 5,100 BTU an hour: a unit conversion, not a spec from either maker. The Mr. Heater Portable Buddy's high setting is 9,000 BTU an hour. That gap is the reason people reach for propane in a garage and for electric in a bedroom.

We deliberately give no watts-per-square-foot rule. The makers' pages do not, and an invented rule is how people end up with the wrong heater. De'Longhi says its radiator suits well-insulated spaces or occasional use; Mr. Heater rates the Buddy at up to 225 square feet, which is a 15 by 15 foot space. Measure your room or garage against those two statements.

For a bedroom or living room: the Dreo tower or the De'Longhi radiator

If you want to set a temperature and forget it, the Dreo is the better tool: a thermostat that goes from 41 to 95°F, a timer up to 12 hours, and a tower shape that takes little floor. Dreo's spec table gives its sound level as 37.5 dB, and a fan heater will always be louder than a radiator.

If sound and dryness bother you more than speed, the De'Longhi is the quieter choice: no fan, so no airflow noise, and its page says the thermal slot design heats the room without drying the air or stirring up dust. The honest cost is time and weight. An oil-filled radiator takes a while to bring a cold room up, and at 23.37 lb it is a heater you roll rather than carry.

Neither of these is a whole-house heater. Both are plug-in heaters limited to 1,500W, and De'Longhi itself limits its radiator to well-insulated spaces or occasional use. If a room is drafty or very cold, expect to supplement with a draft stopper, closed doors, and a smaller target (one room, not the floor).

For a garage or workshop: the Mr. Heater Portable Buddy, with real caveats

The Buddy earns its place in a garage for the plainest reason: it needs no outlet. It heats by propane from a 1 lb cylinder, and Mr. Heater's page lists garages and workshops among its uses. That makes it the realistic choice for a space with no spare circuit, or in a power outage.

It is also the one heater in this guide that makes carbon monoxide. The Consumer Product Safety Commission's 2026 winter advice is blunt about the alarm: "CO alarms should be placed on every level of the home and outside sleeping areas." A garage is not the place to skip that.

On what we could verify: Mr. Heater's product page states the oxygen depletion sensor and the tip-over shut-off, and the 225 square foot rating. It does not mention ventilation or carbon monoxide at all, and the manual links on Mr. Heater's site returned errors when we tried them on October 9, 2026. So we are not going to paraphrase ventilation rules we could not read. Get the MH9BX owner's manual from Mr. Heater before you use it, and follow it, not us.

One more fact from the page: its maximum elevation is listed as 7,000 feet, which matters if you heat a cabin or garage in the mountains.

The safety rules that matter more than the model

These come straight from the Consumer Product Safety Commission's January 2026 winter safety advisory, quoted so you can check them.

• Plug it into the wall — "Plug electric space heaters directly into a wall outlet—never into an extension cord or power strip."
• Turn it off to sleep — "Turn off heaters when sleeping." That includes the thermostat-controlled ones; a timer is a better answer than leaving it on.
• Refuel only when cold — "For fuel-burning portable heaters, never refuel when in use." Turn the Buddy off and let it cool before you swap a cylinder.
• Keep clear of anything that burns — CPSC advises keeping portable heaters at least three feet from drapes, furniture, bedding and other combustible material.
• Alarms before heaters — "CO alarms should be placed on every level of the home and outside sleeping areas." Install them before the first cold night, not after.

What we would buy, by situation

One bedroom, a light sleeper, a room you want held at a set temperature: the Dreo Solaris Slim H3. One quiet well-insulated room, or a room that needs steady background heat: the De'Longhi radiator. A garage, workshop or any space without power: the Mr. Heater Portable Buddy, with the manual read and a CO alarm in place.

If the power goes out, an electric heater only runs from a battery station that can supply it. We worked through that arithmetic in a separate guide on whether a portable power station can run a space heater, and the short version is that a 1,500W heater is a heavy load for a battery.